Crossing a Personality's Borderline
by Mirror and Image
Summary: [Complete] Shiro's not the only one to suffer prolonged trauma. The problem is not everyone believes Pidge when she says that her "Galra imprisonment" started the day she was born.
1. Loss of Childhood

**Crossing a Personality's Borderline**

Mirror and Image

 **Author's Note:** This isn't fanfiction. Well, it is – it's fiction based on a show that we're fans of – but we don't consider this fanfiction. The order is different, the context is different, the details are different, but everything that Pidge's Mom says/does/behaves are things that we experienced. This was a story that needed to be written – not for the readers but for ourselves - and for all the fandoms in the world Pidge was the only one to offer us a voice. Take that as you will.

 **Loss of Childhood**

Katie and her brother Matt were told over and over again that they were lucky.

They were lucky to have a brilliant father who traveled space and worked long hours so there could be food on the table and they should be grateful they ate at all because there were so many children who went to bed hungry.

They were lucky to be intelligent and receive the education they were getting – they were going to the best of schools and they should be grateful that they could handle the pressure because so many children couldn't even do basic calculus in middle school and they were beautiful children that made their mother proud. So proud she made a point of talking about them whenever company was over, singing their praises and listening as all the friends and parents and teachers say Mom did such a good job raising them.

They were lucky to have the money to get their education and to live the lifestyle they had because money was the only thing that mattered to people and so long as you looked expensive people would take you seriously but go get your clothes at consignment we can't afford frivolities because all of that money is going to your education and you're so lucky you're even getting it.

They were lucky to have a mother that had managed to stay sane after everything she had gone through in her childhood because life is hard and life is scary and life is war and I'm constantly balancing between trust and not-trust it's hard so hard to be as giving as I am but I do it for you and I don't have to be this generous!

And, in the dead of night when everyone was asleep, and Katie and Matt looked at each other across the dark room, they would tell each other:

They were lucky because they had each other.

They were lucky because they shared the responsibility of being all-good children.

They were lucky because they shared the responsibility of being no-good children.

… They were lucky because they had a father who believed them when they talked about Mom.

* * *

Oh, when they were children they thought their lives were great.

Katie and Matt would take their stuffed animals and fly them through the air pretending to be in space like their dad, zooming around and discovering galaxies and nebula and black holes and blue stars and riding comets while mining for minerals. They bounced on the couch to see how high they could get into the atmosphere before Mom came in and started yelling at them. If there were afternoons when Mom sat in her rocking chair and Katie and Matt sat at her feet as she explained how hard her life was, well, neither child thought anything of it. It was the only life they knew and because of that they thought it was normal.

If neither of them could understand why Grandma changed when she "drank," because everybody drank (milk, juice, water, even soda if they were really lucky), it must have been something specific to Grandma.

If neither of them could picture what emotional abandonment was, they figured it must be bad because of how Mom described it.

As the two of them got older, they understood implicitly that there were things that made Mom _mad_. Not irritated mad, not frustrated mad, mad like she would yell and one could hear her through the entire house. It wasn't until they were at a much higher reading level that they understood one of Mom's favorite sentences when she was mad – You deliberately disobeyed me!

To disobey was to do something counter to her orders, that made sense since they were little.

Deliberate was a word neither of them knew, and when Matt learned it and rushed home to tell Katie, they were both deeply, deeply confused, because to be deliberate was to do it on purpose, and both of them understood _very, very well_ to _never, ever,_ deliberately do something to make Mom mad.

Katie tried to explain it once – Mom had been talking about something and Katie had missed a sentence or two. Mom started yelling about how she didn't listen she never listened nobody listens and I have to repeat myself and you deliberately disobeyed me!

Katie looked up and shook her head. "Mom," she said, "You're not using the word right – it wasn't deliberate it was accidental."

For the next forty minutes Mom explained to Katie in abject detail why she was wrong, and when Katie went to bed sick to her stomach she look across to Matt, who had been listening in sympathy from the top of the stairs, and they both agreed that correcting her would never be worth it.

Marrying Dad had been the second best thing that happened in her life – which never made a lot of sense to Katie and Matt because the fights their parents had were scary – and for days after a fight she was sit her children at her feet in the rocking chair and explain how terrible their father was.

They, of course, were the best things that happened in her life, because Katie and Matt understood her when no one else in the whole galaxy did.

If that was true, Katie asked once, then when did she say she wished she never gave birth to them when she was mad?

"Well," Mom explained, "I feel things very deeply because of my childhood. Everything hurts me, and I try to put it aside and let it go. I try to be magnanimous and not comment on the slights that are done to me, but the build up over time, and eventually get so big that it just explodes out of me. I'm a giant pillar of pain and all I can do it get it all out of me."

Matt, older than Katie, wondered at night (when it was safe) if it was normal to yell and shout about never having children over something like forgetting to clean the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

When Katie was old enough to name what she was doing, she labeled it the Mom Algorithm. She tried to break Mom down into her different functions and reverse engineer what the triggers were that made her _mad_. She eventually broke her Mom down into four major sub-functions: Waif, Hermit, Queen, and Witch.

By far, the function Mom spent most of her time in was the queen: the house was spotless and filled with rich furniture. All her clothes were brand names, they ate out at least twice a week, she got a new car every year. At parties she made a point of dressing her children in their best and put them on either side of her. Katie and Matt were bored out of their skulls, but they did it because they knew it made their mother feel good when so many adults told her she did an amazing job raising them. The two of them sometimes liked the excursions – it was one of the rare times Mom complimented them, but usually they were being careful not to talk about what Mom was like behind closed doors.

Mom wanted everything done her way, on her schedule, when she said so. This was the cause of many fights with Katie's father, because Dad was an engineer and wanted to do things a certain way. Mom was a biologist and didn't know the first thing about fixing cars or installing lights but by God if you didn't listen to her that was a problem.

There were very few chores she did herself. At first she did everything, but moaned and lamented that it was so hard to do it all. Katie, loving her mom and not wanting to see her like that, offered when she was eight to do the chores. By the time Katie was thirteen they did everything – cooked all three meals, cleaned the house Mom's way, cleaned the bathrooms, did the dishes and the laundry, did the lawn-mowing and gardening, fixed all the incidental things that broke and assembled all furniture that was bought. It never occurred to either of them they were too young for that much responsibility.

It was very important to listen to Mom. Nobody in her life listened to her and her children needed to understand why feeling not-listened-to bothered her so much. Her opinion was Very Important, and if anyone suggested something to the contrary, or even just said they disagreed, the next _one to three hours_ were spent with her either trying to convince you you were wrong or explaining her opinion over and over and _over_ again until you just agreed that she was right.

The biggest reason Mom and Dad fought was over her opinion. According to their mother, Sam Holt was a narcissist – self absorbed and quick to dismiss her concerns and points. One of her favorite sentences in a fight was "What about _me_?!"

Once Matt was thirteen the two of them were brought into Mom and Dad's fights. According to Mom they were very intelligent and mature for their age – and from then on they were trucked into every fight to explain Mom's opinion to Dad since Dad never listened and they were the only ones who understood her.

The second biggest sub-function was the Hermit. Mom wanted to be adored at the parties, but if it wasn't a party she wanted desperately to be left alone. She never answered the door unless no one else was home. The house had two answering machines to make sure nobody bothered her. Before the answering machines, when Katie and Matt were smaller and Mom had to answer the phone, she would hang up on telemarketers and spend an entire afternoon talking about how uncaring and cruel telemarketers were.

Going out was an event. Katie and Matt and Dad had to wait sometimes twenty minutes until Mom was ready, making sure that all her diabetes medication was packed, extra curling irons and hair products if the car wouldn't start and they had to stay in a hotel, three battery chargers for phones, printed maps in case the phones still died, snacks and food in case her blood sugars dropped. So much was packed that Katie and Matt had to sit in the back seat with all of it spread across their laps and unable to move until they parked - and waited another fifteen minutes for Mom to shoot herself with insulin so people wouldn't see her do it and assume she was taking drugs and judge her. Mom always had to pick the parking spot because Dad didn't always think (you're so insensitive you don't care about me you don't love me why did I ever marry you!) and would park where there was a five percent chance or higher of being seen. It was _terrible_ parking in the city if they couldn't find a parking space facing a windowless wall of a building.

And then they would go in and eat for half an hour, and go home.

This was done at least twice a week so Mom's Queen function could feel fulfilled. Eventually Katie and Matt took over packing everything for their mother because they could be more efficient about it - but the price they paid for that was if they ever forgot something. Then Mom would scream about how thoughtless and insensitive they were for the entire drive home, tears streaming down her face: "If you love someone you try to be considerate to them! You try to think about their needs! Why didn't you think about me when you knew we were going out?"

Once they drove all the way to the coast to attend some kind of function, but Katie had forgot to pack a needle for Mom's insulin. It was an hour drive (with Dad speeding) back to their house and Mom cried the entire way home. Katie felt a pit in her stomach as her mother berated her, and through all the bags and packing Matt slid his hand over to hold hers in hidden support.

As compelled as Mom felt about going out for the Queen sub-function, the Hermit sub-function _hated_ it. She found excuses to talk herself out of leaving, and if she did go out for something like going to a mechanic every conversation was reverse engineered for the rest of the afternoon to find out how whoever she was talking to was judging her. Natural pauses in conversation were dissected down to their subatomic level by their mother, and always the other party was determined to look down on her in some way. They went to six different auto mechanics and four different pharmacies and _eight_ different endocrinologists because someone always ended up judging Mom, or giving her a nasty look, or saying something in the wrong tone, or were incompetent, or was too pushy… There was always a reason to change. Eventually Katie and Matt and Dad took over as many of those chores as they could so they didn't have to change again. Dad took care of the mechanic and went with Mom to doctor appointments, Katie handled all prescriptions and if anything had to be done at the bank Matt was just old enough to handle it.

Mom lived in terror of someone disrupting her sleep. She had never been a good sleeper, and even waking up at nine in the morning it took her an hour to wake up and two hours to get ready. What if someone comes at the ungodly hour of seven or eight o'clock, she would ask in desperation. Your father's not here and I would have to answer the door and then I'd be up for the day and I'm already so tired and sleep is so hard to come by! I'm so overwhelmed!

Nobody ever came.

She utterly hated having people over at the house to fix something. She couldn't leave them alone for fear of them stealing something or breaking something but she knew they were going to judge her some way for doing so. Katie and Matt, when they were old enough, were sent to whatever room the handyman was in to watch and make sure they didn't do anything. Both of them learned a lot about building codes and procedures and the rules that existed to be certified to do something, which was interesting, and both of them learned how to give glowing reports of the work that was done and how to couch things that weren't fixed in one day in terms so that Mom didn't react ( _too_ ) badly. The best times were when Dad was home and he took care of it.

The Queen and the Hermit sub-function were the biggest, but Matt told her about the third sub-function, the Waif. Katie had to ask what that word was, and Matt explained it was a person who would would be knocked over by a gentle breeze. This was the part of Mom, Matt explained, that hated herself.

Mom saw herself as a weak person. (She was, but it was never safe to tell her that.) She knew she wasn't strong and utterly _hated_ that things affected her so deeply. When the mood struck her she could talk for hours about all of her faults and explain how she got them. Her childhood was terrible:

Grandma and Grandpa divorced when she was ten. A few years later a strange man slept in Grandma's bed, and after six months Grandma told Mom that she had remarried, but kept it from her children in case her children tattled to the rest of the family. Grandma and Step-Grandpa both enjoyed drinking, and that was the reason that Katie and her brother never saw them. Grandpa only wanted his children to entertain him, and was never once responsible for their care. He loved it when it was his turn for custody of Mom but never once paid alimony – whatever that was. Mom was bullied all through school, told she was over sensitive and petty. There were days when she just sat on her front steps as a child and disappeared into her own mind where she pretended her life was better than what it was. It was step-Grandpa who noticed something was wrong and insisted she go to Guidance.

Mom felt like she never measured up, felt stupid and ugly. A family member once told her that her hair looked like the rats had been chewing on it, she wore make up at the age of twelve to try and look passable, she dreaded her mother picking her up if she had been drinking. She was locked out of her home by her mother when she had to put out the garbage simply for putting on a rain hat. There were dozens of little snapshots of her life that Katie and Matt learned before they really understood what a lot of it meant.

All of this explained why she was the way she was, and why she hated herself so deeply, and since she had never received understanding in her life she needed it more than most people.

"If I'm hurting," she would say, "Wouldn't the natural reaction be to say, 'Why are you hurting?' Wouldn't the natural reaction be to ask what happened to make me so upset? Wouldn't the natural reaction be a desire to help me?"

"But," Katie said, "Isn't it really hard to feel that when when you're saying mean things?"

"But you _caused_ it!" Mom shouted, and Katie realized too late she had said the wrong thing. "If you don't want me to say those things then don't _cause_ it! I will repeat: you have to be more understanding! I don't know where I went wrong raising such and unfeeling, uncaring, disrespectful daughter! Maybe I should have beaten you as children, then you would have learned to show respect! After everything I've done for you!"

(Matt held her that night as Katie felt like the worst person on earth.)

That, that was the fourth sub-function and the most scary. That was the Witch. Named after a certain movie that took place in the magical land of Oz, the Witch protocols were activated whenever Mom was _mad_. Katie and Matt learned as fast as possible to never be the target of the Witch, and when the inevitable happened and either of them did become the target, the safest thing to do was to keep the head down and be passive, agree with every hurtful thing that came out of Mom's mouth, apologize for the transgression, grovel at her feet and beg forgiveness. Eventually Mom would leave, and the other sibling would come in and just sit, silent support as the other felt like less than nothing.

Passivity was the safest course of action, but Dad never seemed to learn it. He kept trying to point out when his points were valid (which was the worst thing to do) or accuse Mom of taking after her parents (which always got her angrier), and the two would scream and yell at each other until Mom pulled one or both of them into a fight to tell Dad she was right and to make him listen.

Katie and Matt lived in terror of the Witch sub-function ever being activated, and went out of their way to make sure they never triggered it. That was why the Mom Algorithm was even developed in the first place.

Most of the time Katie and Matt were all-good children. They were smart and hyper-self-sufficient (there simply was no other option), they listened to Mom when she needed them to and they were huge sources of pride. If things when wrong at school it wasn't their fault - it was the teacher's, or the classmates, or the coaches. It was only a matter of time before the proverbial shoe dropped, however, and Katie and Matt did everything they could to maximize their time as all-good children.

But, in the end, it was all a lie, because eventually the Witch would come out and let them know what she really thought of either of them.

Once, Mom was explaining _yet again_ why Katie didn't support her and Katie had the audacity to ask, "Mom, do you understand that it's frustrating to tell you multiple times a day that I understand and support you and then have you tell me I don't?"

"Well I'm _sorry!_ " Mom shouted, suddenly angry. "I should know better than to come to you! I'm tired of repeating myself; I say the words over and over!" For the next two hours Katie was lectured on everything she did wrong in her life, and the only safe option was for her to sit there and take it, nod and agree with everything her mother said, until the woman had talked herself out and Katie apologized for not being a good enough daughter. For the next three days she was no longer the all-good child, she was the no-good child: cold looks, snide comments and back-handed digs, deliberately asking Matt for help since Katie won't do what needs to be done. Katie passively accepted it, head down, and Matt very carefully – when Mom wasn't in the room and it was safe – would rub her shoulders or nod his head. Both of them had their turns at no-good children, both of them understood the only way to survive it was to quietly take it and never once say anything contrary to to Mom.

* * *

This was their lives. This was how Katie and Matt lived, and they didn't know anything else, didn't understand that it could have been, should have been anything different. As children they would watch TV, see all the cartoon Moms that were sometimes embarrassing or sometimes clueless, all the cartoon Moms that universally without deviation looked out for the cartoon children's needs first and let them be what they needed to be, and Katie and Matt wondered why the shows always got it so backwards. Mom's didn't look after the kids, kids look after the moms.

Katie had dim memories of a parent meeting at school. It must have been for Matt, because she remembered sitting on her dad's lap and playing with a paper clip, trying to see what shapes she could bend it in while all the adults talked. She remembered looking at Matt and seeing him fiddle with his glasses, a bad sign.

Matt, older, explained why the parent meeting had happened: He had been explaining his morning to his teacher – Mom had been mad that he had forgotten to tie his shoes before running out the house and had tripped on the grass. Mom had come with water and band-aid and a fierce lecture about being careful. Matt had told the teacher that Mom wished he hadn't been born for all the fear he caused her, and the teacher had asked if that was something he heard a lot. He told her a bunch of stories about Mom, and that was why they had the parent meeting. Matt remembered the meeting very clearly, because Mom was personable and charming and funny and social. Mom explained what _really_ happened and the teacher agreed with her.

Katie, however mostly remembered when they got home: Mom berated Matt for over two hours for the humiliation she had to suffer – imagine, going to school because you lied about me being abusive! (Katie didn't know that word yet, only that Matt was getting yelled at and was having his turn as a no-good child) Matt was ungrateful for everything she did for him and what she sacrificed to have children and how much she suffered for his sake. Dad tried to insert himself, to say it wasn't that bad, that the perception of children was very different than adults, and that turned into another hour of yelling at Dad, and with both of them being no-good all that was left was Katie, and Mom held her very tight and said she was the only one who understood her. Even at such a young age, the memory was crystal clear to Katie, because she remembered being told that and having the thought that she didn't understand anything. That was when the Mom Algorithm started.

Katie started coding when she was six, simple Hello World programs at first, but she found she liked code a lot. There was structure and grammar, all mistakes could be identified and fixed in a few keystrokes, and everything made sense.

… Everything made sense.

* * *

Heaven was when Dad came home from space. He always took a year between travels – something the press adored because he always told them it was to spend time with his family. Mom loved it too, good optics and kept him in the limelight – nobody could judge him and by extension her if he said things like that. He would spend that year teaching at Galaxy Garrison, the most elite space program in the world, and would always be home by three o'clock on the dot. He gladly took over everything that needed to be done in the house, letting Katie and Matt be children and giving them the time to _play_. He was the buffer, running interference for Mom and being her primary source of stimulus as Katie and Matt could risk going over to friend's houses, or stay after for computer lab, or tutor high school students in trigonometry and calculus, fun things they were too responsible to do while Dad was away and Mom needed them.

Sometimes, Dad would look at his two children and simply nod, and both of them understood: He knew exactly what Mom was like, and he was here not for the _family_ but for _them,_ to spare them in whatever way he could before his work swept him away again. Very carefully, in the early morning when Mom was still asleep, the three of them would talk downstairs in whispers so Mom wouldn't have the off chance of hearing them.

"Can she help it?" Matt asked once. "Can she really not control herself? Does she have to say all those things?"

"The answer to that is yes and no," Dad replied. "Her feelings, the emotions that cause all those reactions, they can't be controlled. She is right when she says her childhood hurt her, but her _behavior_ can be controlled, and that's what we have to try and teach her."

It was cold comfort, Katie and Matt were both old enough to understand they they weren't trained for this: Mom needed more than either of them could give. They were her constant cheerleaders, always trying to promote positive self esteem, telling her how to feel good about herself and praising the smallest things she did to try and make her feel better. They listened and offered advice on her childhood, tried to get her to see things differently and understand herself better. They were... they were her therapists, and neither of them had even entered high school.

They tried. They tried very, very hard.

But it was never enough.

Mom and Dad's relationship was... rocky. Dad never talked about it because, he explained when he was home, children didn't need to know the blow by blow of their parent's grown-up lives.

Mom was, of course, not nearly so protective of them. Since Katie and Matt were her only sources of emotional support, she went to them for everything. Mom and Dad often fought at night, and the next morning when Dad left for the Garrison she would pull them to her rocking chair and explain what happened in the fight. It always started the same way: Dad didn't listen to something Mom said, because Dad never listens, because Dad didn't love her the way she needed to be loved.

"There's a narcissism about him," she said, "He's always thinking about himself first. He doesn't think of others, and I don't think he ever thought of _me_."

Mom's way to break through his selfishness was to deploy her children as weapons, to bring them in to fights and explain her side of things, giving her a numbers advantage. (Dad always apologized to Katie and Matt when they were dragged in, he never wanted them to know about their fights but nobody could control Mom.) Matt figured out quicker than Katie to very quickly go to bed when their voices got loud and pretend to be asleep as soon as their lights were out. They had to listen to the yelling and sometimes screaming – and sometimes pretending wasn't enough, Mom would open the door at one or two in the morning and drag them out of bed anyway to explain to Dad why he wasn't listening to her.

If ever there was a person the Witch subfunction was directed at – it was Dad.

Katie _hated_ listening to Mom berate Dad, because he was _Dad_ , and Mom often said, "I know you don't want to hear it. You love him and don't want to hear bad things about him. But if you're going to love him you should know _all_ about him. Because when the respect goes the love goes..."

Katie and Matt knew everything about their parents' marriage, even when they stopped having sex; Mom left nothing to the imagination and – because they were young and impressionable and didn't always realize that Mom's reality was... off – they believed their mother. Sometimes after a fight they would talk to Dad, explain how they were able to get away with never activating her Witch subfunction and how to deflect it when it was active but not yet targeted. Dad always looked his saddest in those moments, and sometimes all he could do was hug them and say he was sorry, that he was trying his best.

At the time Katie was still too young to really understand – if he was trying his best, then why didn't he do as they explained? Was that the selfishness, the self-serving narcissist that Mom always spoke of?

The marriage when from rocky to sour as Katie grew up – she remembered when she was a kid when Mom would talk about why she loved their father, but as she got older all Mom wanted to talk about was how horrible Sam really was – he didn't love her and probably never loved her – not the way she needed and not the way she deserved. She deserved better, but she willingly sacrificed a lot because the marriage produced Katie and Matt – and that was worth all the abuse their father did to her. "And make no mistakes," she said, "He is abusive. Just like my mother. Just like my father. I don't know how I keep finding them, but I put up with it because God gave me you two."

* * *

Mom was Catholic.

Very Catholic.

She stopped going to church of course because the priests were abusive and drunk on power and the Catholic church was little more than a cult, but Mom watched Mass on TV every Sunday and followed the Catacism to the letter. Katie never understood why, because according to Mom God hated her more than anybody else in the world. She and her brother would spend hours on end explaining that God wasn't _really_ making her suffer, that God wasn't _really_ at fault for Grandma and Grandpa and Step-Grandpa and Dad. Mom believed in God with every fiber of her being, and with every fiber she believed that God falsely-judged her the same way everyone else on the planet falsely-judged her.

Mom begged God for signs, for ways to cope with how hard her life was, and He never answered her. Eventually she stopped praying, because God doesn't listen to me, and instead asked her children to pray for her, He seems to listen to you, and maybe He won't realize the prayers are from me so He won't laugh at me and spit in my eye and make me more miserable.

Katie prayed dutifully, but she doubted God could be bothered with something as insignificant as one tiny human's suffering if He was busy making nebula and dark matter and black holes and galaxies.

… It wasn't like he answered Katie's prayers about her mother.

* * *

Matt was, of course, older than Katie, and the natural consequence of that is that he entered high school – aka Galaxy Garrison – before her. The summer before he moved into the dorms was spent making all sorts of plans. Matt was expected to call Mom twice a week, of course, but he promised to pick up for Katie even in the middle of class so that she had a person to go to if things went bad. Dad was in space at the time and they both implicitly understood that nobody would understand what their mother was like and that they only had each other. Matt was terrified that Katie would permanently become the no-good child without anyone else for Mom to interact with, and Katie was terrified that all the excitement of Garrison and space and piloting would make him forget her the way Mom always forgot them. Matt resolutely told her there was no way that was going to happen, and that he was going to tell her every little detail possible so that she could feel like she was there with him.

Katie kept her calls very sparse – she didn't want to burden Matt with her problems the same way Mom burdened Katie with hers. Everyday annoyances like going out to dinner or listening to Mom complain about something weren't major events, and Katie had promised herself that calls were reserved exclusively for when the Witch sub-function was activated. She couldn't quite adhere to it, however, because sometimes Mom was just so _frustrating_ and she was left so _exasperated_.

Matt always picked up, and a quick motion of his fingers told her if he was in class or not, and he would put in an earbud – one ear only – and Katie would talk as much as she needed to, just vent about whatever was happening and verbally pour all the buildup of negative emotions out of her. If class finished, Matt immediately turned all attention to her, or if not and she finished, he would call that night and they would talk some more. Sometimes the verbal purge was all she needed, sometimes she waited on baited breath for his call so she could whisper-scream everything she couldn't in front of Mom.

The first time the Witch protocols were activated when Matt was away was because... Katie didn't really remember. The incidents that caused them were always so trivial and so out of the blue, she couldn't fathom how other people could remember the details of fights and how they started – there were too many to count. (It wasn't until much, much later, when she had a different name and a castle as a home, that she realized why her memory was sometimes a little blurry – it was a natural defense mechanism the brain activated to protect itself from prolonged trauma) But she does remember standing in the kitchen and the moment all Mom's anger turned with laser-guided focus to her. Katie hadn't been the center of Mom's anger for years, had learned to only ever get side-swiped by it or deescalate before all the subroutines activated. She hadn't done any of those things, and Mom had never seemed so loud or so scary as when Katie was the target. She backed into a corner, shoulders bumping into the walls as Mom shouted at the top of her lungs such terrible things – again, she couldn't really remember the details – and no amount of keeping the head down and being passive made it stop. By the end Katie's insides were shaking as much as her outsides, and once she knew it was safe she hid in her room and called Matt.

He picked up and all Katie had to say was, "It was bad." She watched Matt raise his hand and ask to go to the bathroom. The screen became a jumbled blur as he all but ran somewhere he could take the call and demanded, "What happened?"

She recited everything in perfect detail that would fade just a few hours later, unloaded everything that had happened. Belatedly she realized tears were streaming down her face, but her voice had a detached calm to it as she explained everything that happened.

Matt's face was hard as he listened, nodding and for a while saying very little, understanding how important it was to get everything out in the open before offering support. "What do you need me to do?" he asked. "I can come home for the weekend if you need me to."

Katie blinked, wide-eyed, as she realized that Matt had just offered to skip school, just go AWOL from _Galaxy Garrison_ , in order to be there for her emotionally. The moment crystallized in her head, because her first impulse was to say _yes, yes please_ , but that reaction was a _Mom_ reaction. The last thing either of them wanted was to turn into _Mom_ , and she would be _damned_ if she stopped Matt from going up to space. She explained all of this to Matt, and broke even further, because for the first time someone was offering something she needed, giving it without expectation or payment, everything she had ever wanted from her mother, but it wasn't the right thing to do. Matt was upset too as he realized just what the two of them were turning into, and Katie would never know what they might have decided before a foreign voice interrupted their conversation.

"Cadet," the voice said, stern and making Matt's picture jolt as he fumbled to stuff his phone into a pocket.

"Sir! Captain Shirogane, sir!"

The image was darkness, and the noise muffled, but the voice was very clear.

"I believe restrooms are used for activities that don't require phones."

"Sir, yes, sir!"

"Hand it over, cadet."

Katie didn't see much, florescent ceiling lights and a strong jaw before the line went dead, and all she could think about was she had lost her one lifeline to living with her mother. Then her next thought was what kind of trouble her brother was about to get into. Then her next thought was to feel guilty that _that_ hadn't been her _first_ thought. She was a jumbled mess and she just stared at her phone for an eternity, silently wishing she could learn what happened and slowly realizing she probably never would. The finality of never talking to her brother again until leave sank in slowly, and for the rest of the day she was just... numb.

Mom's lecture, later, explaining why Katie had been so wrong and what she had to do to make reparations, never sank into her head as she just nodded and repeated the same empty promises of listening better and changing to become a better daughter. Her mother actually asked if she was okay, and Katie looked at her confused, a part of her mind shrieking at the top of it's lungs _OF COURSE I'M NOT OKAY but I can't explain that to you because you'll blame me for it and I have no one to talk to because Matt JUST LOST HIS PHONE._ She said none of those things, only mumbled that it had been a long day, and Mom hugged her and told her to lie down a rest – a motherly thing to say but empty of whatever emotion was supposed to be there, because Katie knew the sentiment was only temporary.

She wrote parsers after dinner for three different computer languages just to try and jump-start her brain, try and focus on her school work and hope that it would be enough of a distraction. She looked at the computer clock, mentally ticking down to Garrison's lights-out before shaking her head and knowing it was never going to happen again. This would bother her for days, she knew, before she could put herself together again, and she couldn't let that happen because her mother needed her to be perfect and she couldn't be perfect if she felt like _this._

The clock passed another hour, and to her surprise her phone vibrated. She picked it up, confused who would text her at this time, and had to drop the phone and cover her mouth to prevent shrieking as she saw her brother's name on the message.

 _I'm back! What happened with Mom?_

Katie started typing furiously.

 _HOW DID YOU GET YOUR PHONE BACK?_

 _Capt Shiro gave it back. Just now._

… _HOW?_

 _he called me to office. We talked. He gave it back._

Katie was beside herself. She stared at the phone in blank incomprehension before typing _Details!_ Her phone rang and she picked up, getting off her bed to close her bedroom door so Mom wouldn't have a chance of hearing her. She never felt so relieved to see her brother's face on the screen.

"Oh my god," she whispered. "How did you even get your phone back?"

Matt's grin was spread from ear to ear, eyes wide and for a second all he could do was smile at her, unable to articulate whatever had happened. "Sorry," he said, covering his face and rubbing it. To Katie's shock he was talking in normal tones. "Sorry," he repeated, "I just can't believe it all happened and I'm still kind of trying to process." And... did he just giggle? "Okay, okay. Do you remember a couple of years ago, Dad was teaching and there was this one student he just kept bringing up?"

"TS, right?" Katie asked, trying to remember. "He might have said the name once by accident; I sort of remember it wasn't Eurpoean and I didn't know the language enough to remember the syllables."

"I know who it was!" Matt said giddily, not even trying to be quiet in... wait, he wasn't in his dorm room. Where was he? "Takeshi Shirogane!"

Katie blinked, mind still fixated on figuring out where Matt was, but then the name washed over her and she stared at Matt's image on the phone in unhindered surprise. "Wait, wait," she said. "The superstar cadet who was going to do great things that Dad never shut up about was the same guy who was recruited for his first deep space mission _before_ he graduated the Garrison?"

"Yup!"

"TS was Cadet Takeshi Shirogane?"

"Wasn't it so obvious?"

Katie had a different thought. "... And this guy gave you back your phone? _Why_? Didn't his record say he was, like, the most by-the-books person in the whole planet? That's what all the news reports said when he went on his first mission, right? That he was not only a star student but also he had the squeakiest of squeaky clean records for the commanders to make the recommendation, something like that?"

"He wasn't really that squeaky," Matt said, still with that shit-eating grin. "He told me he took a lot of calls for someone he considered a brother, that he understood."

"You told him it was _me?_ " Katie demanded, incredulous before catching herself and switching back to a whisper.

Matt shook his head, and Katie still couldn't figure out where he was. "My phone was unlocked, he looked at the call log, he saw your name. He took the phone and I spent the whole day freaking out, you know? But then after dinner he paged me to his office and we talked. Like, we _talked_. He asked who 'Pigeon' was and I had to explain about you and why I call you that. He told me about this kid he knows that he considers a brother, how he took calls in class for the guy when he needed to; he told me how much he looked up to Dad and said he heard a lot of stories about us when he went to the international space station – Dad was up there at the time before he left for Saturn. And then he gave me back the phone and said to be better about deciding when to take a call. And then he told me about the roof!"

"The roof?" Katie whispered. "Is that where you are now?"

"Yeah, he took me up here and told me, he said, 'I'm going to do a bit of star gazing in an hour. I expect it to be private by the time I get up here.' So we have..." Matt's gaze focused as he shifted his attention to a different part of the screen, "well, we've got until the next hour mark before he comes back. He is, like, the coolest guy I've ever met, I hope he's teaching when you get here. Now what's going on with Mom? Has the witch function shut down?"

They talked until it was quarter of, and then Matt signed off and Katie held the phone, looking down at it.

She could still survive her mother.

What a relief...

Two days later Katie got a call from her father, Dad saying that one of the Garrison instructors had sent him a message all the way up at the international space station to let him know his daughter might have had a bad day. Katie was flabbergasted, both that Dad had put in the effort to make the call, and that the captain Matt had spoken so highly of was so... thoughtful.

She wasn't used to adults being thoughtful. Not in regards to her. She didn't quite know what to think of it.

* * *

Things were different when Matt was on leave from the Garrison – the whole experience changed him in a way Katie didn't completely understand, except he backed down from Mom less, tried to stand up for himself the way Dad did. It never ended well, and sometimes the entire visit was Matt being the no-good child, and Katie would have to listen to Mom drone on about how they must not be doing right by Matt, because he doesn't listen anymore, and he was proving to her that he never took her feelings into account. It was everything Katie could do to not react, because she and Matt spent their _entire lives_ living and dying by Mom's feelings, and they both avoided every pothole and trigger and warning sign they could to prevent her witch subfunction from activating.

Matt explained that life at the Garrison was different. "You'll get it when you're there," he promised. "It's like... you're free. I mean, it's still school and the instructors and sergeants will still punish you, but it's not like here," he said, gesturing to the house. "There's no land mines to navigate. There's no jump-scares or hidden traps that make them berate you. Commander Iverson, he makes examples out of people – but it's honest mistakes, you know? Not petty little slights."

"Do you even hear yourself?" Katie asked. " 'Petty little slights?' Do you know what Mom would say if she heard that?"

"I do," Matt said, solemn. "But I understand now that that's exactly what it all is. She's wrong when she says she lets things go until they build up. If they build up then she's not letting them go, and that's not healthy. She's manipulative, you know that right?"

Katie blinked, not quite connecting "mom" and "manipulative" in the same way Matt seemed to. Her brother saw her confusion and explained.

"You forget to pick up her prescriptions," he said as an example. "You feel bad about it, right?"

"Yes."

"But is it the end of the world?"

"It is for Mom."

"Ignore Mom. Is it the end of the world?"

Katie shook her head. "No, I just have to go back and pick them up. It's a special trip but so what?"

"Then Mom finds out and how do you feel?"

"Miserable."

"And coupled with that feeling is the understanding, the promise, and it will happen again if you dare forget," Matt said. "That's manipulation. Heck, why do you even pick up the prescriptions?"

"Because it's hard for Mom."

"But why is a teenager picking up prescriptions for her mother?"

And, for the first time, Katie asked herself that as well. She had been picking up prescriptions for so long that it never occurred to ask herself why. Yes, Mom's hermit partition hated going out; and yes, Mom's queen partition hated doing things herself, but normal adults – regular people – picked up their own prescriptions. Normal people didn't need to over prepare for going out to eat, normal people didn't start yelling when they stubbed a toe and didn't start screaming if things weren't going their way. Their Mom wasn't normal, and Katie couldn't quite reconcile that sentence. Her mom was everything she knew, she couldn't fathom living another way, and yet thousands of people did every day.

Katie mourned for a long, long time, after realizing the truth. Matt held her the entire time, rubbing her arm and letting her grieve, giving her the time to yearn for what could have been, a dozen different child cartoons flitting through her head and realizing they were actually _true_ , and that it was _she_ who had everything backwards because _Mom_ was so backwards.

"What are we going to do?" she asked, late at night when it was safe.

"We find freedom," Matt said.

"But how?" Katie asked. "The only way we're free of her is if she dies, and that's not going to happen for decades!"

"We move out."

… What?

"... What?"

Matt looked passed Katie's shoulder to the door, making sure it was shut and that the hall lights were still off. "We move out," he repeated. "I have an escape plan. Once Dad's back on earth we can tell him about it. When I graduate I also turn eighteen, remember? Legal adult. Well, why do I have to still live at home if I'm a legal adult?"

Katie frowned. "But I'm still here with her. I'm not even in Garrison yet, I don't know if I can survive this for another-"

"Not if you come with me," Matt interrupted. Katie blinked, slow to pick up what he was saying. "Wherever I move to will be small – like, really small; one, two bedrooms max. So small she can't up and decide to move in with us when she up and decides to divorce Dad. It'll be near the Garrison – that'll be the excuse – so you can focus on your schoolwork."

"But she'll flip out at even suggesting it," Katie said. "We'd be abandoning her the same way everyone else abandons her, it's the ultimate betrayal. Her witch subfunction would be active for _days_ , maybe even _weeks_."

"Yeah," Matt said, a hungry gleam in his eye. "Too bad we won't be there for her to yell at."

The logic of the statement hit Katie hard as she realized just how profound something as simple as _not being there_ was. Her eyes dilated at even the hope of never being in the house when the witch subfunction activated, and she was too afraid to think of it as anything more than hope.

"But what about Mom," she asked, still trying to figure out how this could work. "She doesn't do anything anymore, she couldn't survive without us."

"She's forty-eight years old," Matt said, voice bitter but also filled with backbone. "I think she can handle living alone."

"But-"

"Pigeon," Matt said, "I won't do this if you don't agree to it, but think about it okay? You've got a year to think about it. Dad'll be home in a couple of months and it'll be a while before he picks his team for the Kerberos mission so enjoy it."

Katie nodded slowly, and she dreamed of life outside of the house, outside of Mom, and tried to taste what a release of pressure that big would feel like.

When Dad came home from the space station, Katie urged Matt not to tell him of The Plan, of the move out. She wasn't ready to accept that escape was possible, let alone an option for her. She had spent her whole life just... assuming Mom would be there for all of it, and that Mom would yell and moan and lament and shift between her four functions for all eternity, until she passed away from old age – probably when Katie was, like, fifty or something and old herself. Katie had long ago resigned herself to the fact that her life was her life, and that nothing would ever change.

* * *

And then the Garrison selected Matt to join his father for the Kerberos mission.

Matt was equal parts upset and excited – the only other person who had been selected for a deep space mission before graduation was Captain Shirogane – who was also part of the team. It was the chance of a lifetime, but it meant that for the better part of two years Katie would be by herself with Mom, and Matt simply couldn't abide by that, because it meant putting off The Plan and he couldn't bring himself to do that to her. She wouldn't even be able to call him, contact would be sporadic at best, it took weeks and months for transmissions to reach earth from that distance, and he was so panicked over his ambivalence that Mom actually picked up on it.

"I love you, sweety," she said gently, putting a hand on his shoulder. "I love that you care enough to worry about me, but I never once stood in your way-"(that was a blatant lie she _always_ stood in the way whether she knew it or not)"-and this is a chance that doesn't come by a second time. I'll be fine, I have Katie to keep me company."

Katie and Matt shared a look, because that might have been meant to be encouraging but it was actually a death sentence. Matt paced back and forth at night, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do. Katie was fine with him going – wanted him to be successful, but Matt just couldn't let Katie go through _two years_ alone with Mom – no back up, no one to talk to, no one to help her stay sane. It wasn't until he got a call from Captain Shirogane – an hour long conversation that he had outside the house where Mom couldn't hear that he finally decided to go. He didn't talk about it much, said only that the captain had convinced him, and then told Katie in no uncertain terms that it was her responsibility to look for apartments near the Garrison for when they came back. He had already been looking, had a list for Katie to look at first, and said she had one month while they were on the space station for prep to call him as much as necessary.

"Don't hold back," he said, "Don't put it off, don't settle for an email. Get as much of me and Dad as you can, store up all the conversations and the memories, think about all the things we'll probably share with you, and use it to get you through it. Look at apartments, look up insurance, I'll leave all my financial information with you: plan a budget, make the Plan as real as you can so that when Dad and I run out, you can use _it_ to get you through it. It's a countdown: two years and three months. That's how long you have to last. Two years and three months. Do you understand?"

Katie didn't, but she nodded and let Matt go to space with some semblance of solace.

She lamented for weeks that she wasn't going with them, knowing the special kind of hell she was about to enter and knowing that there would be no escape. Not like Matt and Dad got. She understood on a different level why Dad must have loved space – to get away from Mom.

The night before the launch they had a family dinner. Mom was preening over the prestige her husband and son were receiving and was too happy to notice the dour mood Katie had brought to the table. Dad did, though.

"Something tells me that you're gonna have your own crew someday," he said, "and you're gonna fly with them to worlds so far away we can't even imagine! I bet my bottom dollar you're going to be part of something that makes the whole universe sit up and take notice."

The words were soft and inspiring, like Dad's words tended to be, but the way he held her gaze the look on his face, made her wonder if there was subtext to the words: a crew of her own... worlds so far away... it was almost like he was suggesting her world would... would _grow_ , grow to encompass more than Mom, more than the subfunctions and the fear of the Witch. Matt was so focused on getting themselves out of the house, but Dad said something in regards to her very future and... and she... she couldn't see what he was seeing.

It... It wasn't until they were gone that she really started thinking about it – not fantasize, but actually _think_ about what living without Mom would be like. There weren't going to be any sudden chores she didn't think of, she and Matt did literally all the chores at this point, so there wasn't going to be a sudden influx of responsibility. Galaxy Garrison was a recruitment office, it took the best of the best and its payment was picking such students for their space program. Could they afford it?

That was the question that made Katie look at her brother's files. She saw the spreadsheets of Matt's projected income and the estimated bills they would be paying: water, gas, electricity, communications; home, vehicle, health and life insurance; retirement, food, and spending money. It would be hand-to-mouth while Katie was at Garrison, but once she graduated they would be raking in money.

… that was when it became real to Katie. That was when she realized escape was possible, even necessary, and her mind _salivated_ at the idea.

It became her new project, looking at the apartments Matt had picked and narrowing it down, calling him up at the space station and making lists and plans, organizing and reorganizing and _re_ organizing what they were going to do and how they were going to escape.

Matt called it the Plan, and it was certainly an appropriate moniker, but Katie thought a more accurate name was _Escape_ ; they were going to escape their mother and be free to do what they wanted. God, Katie wasn't even sure what she wanted to do. She had always toyed with the idea of being a pilot, thought about engineering and information service technology, but now she could actually _be_ those things, not a biologist like her mother had (not subtly) indicated she should be.

Every day she called the space station, and Matt or Dad answered, and sometimes she could hear Captain Shirogane quipping something, but for two weeks she did what Matt told her, soaked up their support and stored it away and got as many details from them as possible, before the shuttle was ready and their only contact would be thirty second video messages and emails that took longer and longer to travel to her.

Katie held her hope close to her chest, she picked the apartment she wanted and sent the intel to Matt, even managed to sneak away from her mother's prying eye to visit the complex and talk to the leasing office, getting to walk through a show place and picturing where her bed would go and what they would do for food and how to set up a TV and gaming center. She – very slowly, very gradually – carved time for herself away from the house where she would just... do whatever. She told Mom she had computer club and a robotics competition coming up – a blatant lie – but it gave her the excuse to say out as late as four or five if she didn't want to go home and instead brought her laptop to the library and continued to build her future.

And then the news hit.

And men in uniforms knocked on their door.

And there was a funeral.

… And everything changed for the worst.

* * *

 **Author's Notes II:** As stated before, the order is different and the context is different but that is someone in our life.

More than anything else this fic is catharsis. We take something intensely, painfully, intimately traumatic for us and we pour it out all on digital paper to get it out of our system and try to turn it into something positive.

Katie/Pidge is as close to her character as we can stay while still using her as a mouthpiece for some of the things that happened to us. We didn't dream about galaxies, and while we did get interested in coding it wasn't until we were in college and we certainly aren't geniuses. We also very deliberately made a difference between Matt and Katie/Pidge - Matt is the adult mouthpiece of us, what we sounded like after entering therapy, after realizing exactly what our lives were like.

Katie/Pidge doesn't learn the name of what her mother has, because we couldn't get her into therapy in a way where she felt safe to talk about her mom, but we did leave a hint here and there, and will name it later.

Next chapter: Loss of Family. See you next week.


	2. Loss of Family

**Part Two: Loss of Family**

The night the uniforms came, Katie slept but didn't understand how or why. Mom didn't, a loss that big too profound for her to do anything but pace up and down the house, her mind consumed with what had just happened. Katie understood that there was no way Mom could be expected to handle... the arrangements...

And so, less than twelve hours after hearing the words, "They're gone," Katie had scoured the house for every scrap of mail, every phone number she could come up with and spent the morning making calls. She was forced to say, "My dad and brother passed away," over and over in rapid succession, tears streaming down her face as she asked what she was supposed to do and what they were supposed to know. Insurances, billing companies, utilities, creditors. Katie was surrounded with papers and notes and new lists to do. She looked up and called a funeral home, making the appointment and sick to her stomach that she would have to drag her mother along.

The work kept her mind active, and in that respect she did it gladly, but she also knew that if she left it to Mom nothing would get done, because she would be so _slow_ about it.

Mom didn't speak much – a relief at first – and Katie did as much as she feasibly could with the reprieve. After Matt's rough introduction to financing (re: his plans for the Escape, and God damn him (not really, please don't damn him) for giving her that much hope and now having it all taken away) she dug through the bank books. Going through all the paperwork was a mess – Dad was a lot of things but organized wasn't one of them; Katie found papers in every room of the house, his car, under beds, in closets, everywhere. Some of the papers dated back to before she was born – she found the original mortgage of the house, and her and Matt's birth certificates, medical records and immunizations.

She also discovered that Mom and Dad had refinanced no less than four times over the course of her life, always to eliminate debt. They had refinanced just last year, and by Katie's calculation were already 30,000 under water. That made her look back at the credit card bills – jewelry, shoes, a dozen different brand names – and she realized _why_ they refinanced all the time. All those times Katie got her clothes at consignment, all those times she was told they couldn't afford new laptops or circuitboards, all those times they put off doing work around the house because the money wasn't there, all those times Mom said the money was dedicated to the mortgage and cars... it was all a lie.

Katie was numb with the revelation while they went to the funeral home. After two days of minimal interaction, the funeral director gently guided Mom into talking about Dad and Matt, and Katie watched her mother's subfunctions slowly activate. She watched her mom slowly realize that someone was asking her to talk about herself, and even under all the grief and shock, something in Mom glowed at the chance to be the center of attention, and she came alive, giving all the gory details of her marriage with Dad, and her pride of her son, and her feeling of utter betrayal now that they were gone.

She did it again with the priest, talked all about her skewed memories of events, and again at the receiving line. She was the center of attention, labelling Dad's giving nature as selfishness, marking Matt's intelligence as a lack of self-awareness, and Katie could only stare at her phone as her mother commanded so much attention. Mom picked the prayers for the service, and Katie, while Mom was talking unendingly to anyone who would listen, quietly wrote the eulogy for her father and brother and read it to the assembled. Katie was numb by then, empty of tears even though she wanted to cry desperately.

Once the service was over, she and her mother went back to the house, and any chance to going outside the house was forfeit. Katie got up early, and now she couldn't even share the responsibility of the chores – she did everything: cooking, cleaning, laundry, while Mom whiled away her time on her computer, expressing her grief to her online friends and soaking up the well-wishes and thoughts and prayers. A week after the service one of the appliances broke, and the obvious string of bad luck was a sign that God hated Mom and was cursing her and she cried and wailed for hours. Katie had to call a repairman – only he couldn't fix it and the damn thing was no longer under warranty. Katie, fourteen, bought the replacement and handled it being installed.

She added it to the debt.

For a little while, the hurt was so raw for both of them that Katie thought they might actually be honest with one another, that the tragedy might turn into something positive: i.e. a functioning relationship with her mother. The Stages of Grief were universal – everybody went through it and maybe they could go through it together. Katie was a little scared, because her analysis of Mom's algorithms told her that Anger and Depression would stick the longest, and neither of those were pleasant to go through, but she thought maybe Acceptance could be something bigger, better, and make things turn a corner.

Katie failed to realize that her parents' fights were more than just horrible to listen to, it made Dad the central target of all of Mom's dark projections.

Mom was talking to Katie in her rocking chair, Katie listening with only half an ear (which was very dangerous to do but Katie was still trying to figure out how to curb her mother's spending until all the money issues leveled out) as she grieved the loss of Dad, saying how their marriage wasn't perfect and he wasn't always there, but it was better than nothing and now she had nothing. Katie hummed agreement at all the right places, nodded when she needed to and gave a full sentence when necessary, but suddenly Mom switched to Anger, and Katie's attention rapidly narrowed when the voice started to rise.

"... and he was _evil_ , and _ugly_ , and a narcissist! And right now, I hate to say it, but right now I feel like your father was the Anti-Christ!"

Katie stared at her mother, the words burning into her ears and burrowing deep into her brain, and in a fit of _insanity_ , Katie didn't nod and agree, Katie didn't try to deflect or downgrade the comment, Katie didn't let the statement slide.

Instead, numb, Katie closed her laptop, got up, and went to her room.

Some self-preservation did still exist, because when she did so she locked the door.

Abandoning Mom at such a moment was tantamount to suicide – leaving Mom when she was expressing her opinion, was explaining her emotional abuse, was expecting validation for every feeling she ever felt and did, was the absolute _worst thing_ to do; and Katie sat behind her bed and listened as her mother was first shocked that Katie had left, demanding to know where she was going, and then being _furious_.

"You're selfish!" Mom shouted from the other side of the door, twisting at the lock and banging on the wood panelling. "You self-righteous bitch! You ungrateful bitch! After everything I sacrificed for you! I should have beaten you as a child! _I wish I never gave birth to you! Your father raped me to get you!_ "

Katie rocked back and forth slightly, unable to unhear it, unable to escape the onslaught, having only the wood door nominally protect her from what was happening. This was the pillar of pain, this was Mom unleashing all her negative emotions and damn the consequences and damn the people in the line of fire. Katie knew that a few hours later, when Mom calmed down, there would be an explanation of the lead-up of events, of Mom asking Katie why she abandoned her when she needed her, or pointing out that when an animal is caught in a trap it will lash out but that the right thing to do is still treat the animal's pain, all the justifications in the world as to why Katie shouldn't have left.

And whether Katie wanted to or not she would agree with everything her mother would say, apologize for being so self-centered and self-serving.

But she knew she would do it again.

And again.

… They were _dead_. Nobody said bad things about the _dead_ , but Mom never had personal boundaries, so... why start now?

* * *

Two days after that she finally went back to school, and she got as far as her locker before she burst into tears. Somebody touched her shoulders and she was guided into the Guidance Office, and the guidance counselor let her have her cry before asking if she missed her family.

Katie couldn't even comprehend the question.

"This isn't about that," she said, gesturing vaguely to her tears, "It's about Mom – she needs me to be perfect and I can't be perfect!"

The counselor was gentle. "No mother expects their child to be perfect, and you've been through a great tragedy."

"No," Katie insisted, inconsolable, "You don't understand – I have to do _everything_ , and if I do even one little thing wrong it all ends so badly! Now Matt and Dad aren't here to share the blame, it's going to be all on me! She's going to leech all her emotional support off of me, and I have to give it whether I have it or not and I _don't know how I'm going to get through this!_ "

Years and years later, Katie would recognize that the counselor didn't understand. How could anybody that had a functioning and healthy childhood understand? How could anybody know what it was like to live in a house silently worrying when – not if, _when_ – the witch subfunction would activate? How could anybody know what Mom was like when she never, ever, _ever_ showed it in public and rationally explained how justified her reactions were?

"I'm going to call home," the counselor said, "Let's send you home for the day."

The thought of Mom knowing that Katie was so upset as to be sent home was untenable, and Katie begged and _begged_ , "Please, don't send me home! I don't want to spend time with her, I want to be _away_ from her!"

But Katie was fourteen, not yet an adult, and adults didn't listen to children the same way they listened to other adults. Katie was helpless, could only sit in the counselor's office and wait for her mother to come pick her up and put herself back together as fast as possible. She pulled out her laptop and started playing a game, some thing mindless that required just enough of her attention that the tears dried out and a semblance of calm could settle over her; survival had taught her to pick herself up as quickly as possible, and she new all the ways to distract herself until her brain could come back online and silently curse the guidance counselor's decision.

Matt had warned her of this, had told her that adults wouldn't believe them if they talked about Mom. He had tried once, and the parent meeting that was called and the aftermath afterwards was decidedly _not worth it_. Katie had lived off of his experience, but now she had her own experience, her own memory to call up and remember why talking about her Mom didn't do any good.

The counselor talked to Mom before she let Katie go home, and Katie in turn waited for the shoe to drop. The drive home was filled with Mom telling her, "Sweetie, you don't have to be perfect for me. We're both suffering right now, it's okay to have an off day."

 _If it's okay to have an off day,_ Katie silently wondered, _then what about me leaving when you needed me? Was THAT okay? Oh, wait, it wasn't, and you said..._ Katie shut down the thought before she actually said something. She spent the day in her room, door closed but not locked (never locked, it was foolhardy to think Mom couldn't and didn't interrupt any activity she and Matt were doing and it would all have to be put on pause to listen to whatever she wanted to talk about). She reformatted hard drives and created partitions, downloaded two gigs worth of music to play in her headphones, anything to make herself seem unavailable. She barely said two words at dinner, just listened with one ear as Mom said all the right words about support – she probably meant well, probably even meant everything she said, but Katie knew it wasn't actually _true_ , because everything would be null and void when the witch came out.

That night her phone vibrated, and she looked at the sender and quickly covered her mouth.

 _Matt Holt._

Katie curled into herself, containing her reaction (not out loud not out loud _notoutloud_ ). Once her adrenal levels were back to normal she opened up the message.

 _Hey, Pigeon!_

 _We're three days out from landing on Kerberos. Not much to report for now. Shiro says I can try to send a video when we land. Dad's getting giddy about landing._

 _So this is the countdown: Three!_

 _Matt_

Katie looked at the date, two weeks before the reported crash. … What?

She was online until two in the morning, went to school on three hours sleep and ignored everything going on in class to research the puzzle that had just landed on her lap. She had known that messages could only travel so fast, and that further and further away from earth the longer and longer it would take, but now she needed to figure out exactly how long, what the factors were that inhibited or encouraged travel, specs on the Garrison technology and how it projected their messages, solar storms and meteor showers, nonEuclidean math which she was rusty on. The message told her the send date, and Katie knew the receive date, but now she needed to predict how long to wait for the next message. Matt messaged her every day, and if this message was three days out, then there were two other messages that were coming, and Katie wanted to know when they were coming.

When she got home she was perfectly content to go back to her room and work but Mom was already at the door: "They're going to repossess the cars!"

Katie blinked, the sentence so random it took a minute for her to process. "What?"

And that was how she learned that the bank that held the loans on the car payments had put leans on the cars and demanded the rest of the money owed immediately – they would no longer take monthly payments. They didn't outright say they would repossess the cars, but the subtext was very clear.

Since Katie was responsible for all phone calls and had easily made four dozen since it all started, she called the bank and asked for options on what to do. She made the mistake of putting the call on speaker – ostensibly so Mom could watch Katie work but in reality to let Mom know that Katie was busy and couldn't be distracted. The bank wasn't a bank but a loan company with the word bank in its title – as far as Katie could tell – and the lean had been made the day Katie had called everyone to inform them of Dad and Matt's deaths. She tried her best, she really did, but the deadline for payment was only a few days away.

" _You heartless bitch!_ " Mom shouted suddenly, startling Katie from taking notes during her conversation. "I've just been widowed! I don't deserve this!"

Katie quickly took the phone off speaker and pulled it to her ear. "I'm sorry," she said quickly, "I'm going to have to call you back." She might have heard an, " _I understand_ ," from the other end, but she couldn't be sure. Instead she looked up and realized that Mom's witch was active, and it was looking at Katie.

" _Why did you apologize_?" she shouted.

"Uh..." Katie said, rapidly cycling through possible responses that could deescalate. "It was habit? You did such a good job raising me that you taught me about common courtesy and it just sort of fell out of my mouth?"

"They don't deserve courtesy!" Mom shouted. "They were heartless! You apologized because of me! You just made me look like a crazy person! You put the blame on me and I'm not to blame!"

"No, of course not, I never said you were to blame," Katie said, carefully _not_ leaning back in her chair and voice perfectly calm and level.

"You implied it when you apologized! Apologizing means taking the blame, and _I am not to blame_ for those spawns of Satan _repossessing MY cars!_ "

"I understand how you feel," Katie said quickly. Calmly. "That woman was very clinical and did not express a lot of compassion. I understand that it didn't sound very emotionally supportive and I understand why that would make you feel upset."

"Then _why did you apologize_?"

"Because you're such a great mom: You made sure I knew how to be courteous and polite and you made sure it was automatic. I didn't even think when I said sorry, my primary focus was to hang up and be there for you and give you emotional support."

A pause drew out, Mom scrutinizing the explanation and looking for a fault. Katie was an expert, however, at deflecting the witch sub-function, and Katie wasn't _really_ who Mom was mad at. At length, nothing. Then;

"I can't believe those loan-sharks are threatening to repossess the cars!"

Katie displayed no outward signs of course, but inside she breathed a huge sigh of relief at dodging that bullet. She spent the rest of the afternoon listening to Mom rail at the injustice, helped her write a letter to the head of the loan company, full of aggressive and unhelpful language that Katie carefully tried to reword to something stern instead of something accusatory. And then Mom wrote out checks for paying off the cars, and Katie added it to the debt.

By Katie's calculations, she would receive the next message from Matt at the end of next week. Being only Tuesday, she had plenty of time to mentally prepare herself for it. She had already resolutely decided that Mom wouldn't see these messages, Mom pervaded every facet of Katie's life and this was something so personal, so intimate, that she couldn't bring herself to tell her – family related or not. There was also, she reasoned, the possibility of Matt saying something about the doomed Plan, and she couldn't risk Mom knowing about something that was never going to happen.

* * *

That didn't mean her two weeks weren't stressful, however. The guidance counselor called her in every day for grief counseling – which seemed silly to Katie because all she could think about was her mom and how to stay under the radar as the woman was even more emotionally sensitive than normal. She was worried about the debt and figuring out how to make Mom pay off all the credit cards especially now that the checking accounts were so much less after paying off the cars. They had gotten a letter from their bank (money bank, not the people who traumatized Mom over the cars) that the bank had been bought out – that there would be changes the next month, and Katie knew very, very, well that change was a four letter word in Mom's vocabulary. There was also schoolwork, but that was so far down the priority lists that Katie looked up at one point and wondered what she was even doing at school.

Except now Galaxy Garrison was her only hope. She absolutely _had_ to get in, then she could be away from Mom months at a time. And then she would graduate and be in space and then...

Why was she deluding herself? Mom would actually have to take care of herself, and Katie wasn't sure she could.

Especially when she came home that Friday and found Mom unconscious on the kitchen floor. Katie fell to her knees to check for a pulse or something, but Mom felt the touch and started screaming, jolting Katie back to the other end of the kitchen. When the screaming stopped Katie crawled forward more carefully, and saw the wandering eyes and twitchy eyebrows.

"Mom," Katie said carefully, "You are in a diabetic reaction. Do you understand?"

No response.

Sighing, Katie went up the the master bedroom and grabbed the testing kit. Mom's blood sugars were not low, as Katie had expected, but rather high – the reader came back 999, the highest number it could register, and Katie realized that since the news Mom hadn't taken any insulin. Emergency glucose was the opposite of what was necessary, instead Katie called for an ambulance.

Fourteen year old Katie had to tell the emergency room what their insurance was by bringing her mother's purse and dumping it upside down on the receptionist desk so they could look for the right cards, recite what she knew of her mother's medical history, and sit for two hours in the main lobby, before going in to the ER to a smaller waiting room and waiting another two hours. The doctors explained that while they could control the blood sugars, there was something else wrong with her, and that she was "very, very sick. That's two verys." Katie nodded and sat in her mother's ER bay, watching all the monitors and blood pressure and heart rate.

Katie had to take a cab home, she wasn't old enough to drive. Being home alone was... Katie did everything anyway so the only change was that she didn't have to worry about Mom interrupting to talk about something. It... was actually a relief, and when Katie realized she had that thought she hated herself.

For four days Katie lived life normally – waking up, getting breakfast, going to school (and asking the office about free and reduced lunch programs), coming home to do the laundry, cleaning house, mowing the lawn, getting dinner, doing homework numbly. By ten or eleven she would move to her math project about Matt's messages, and even though she roughly knew when the message was coming she went over the math again, or reread the Garrison report on what they knew of the crash and jotting down the details. She looked up parts to make a dish that would better receive the signal – she couldn't outright _buy_ one with the debt they had but she had a new project for her focus on.

Over the weekend she called a lawyer to start handling probate – she would have rather done it herself to save money, but as smart as Katie was the language of the probate documents whistled over her. The lawyer also said he did other things, and Katie asked about medical power of attorney and power of attorney. With Katie being the only family Mom had she was the only person who could make medical decisions for her, and if she had power of attorney then maybe she could sign checks so Mom wouldn't have to worry about the bills and Katie's growing stress over all the debt. God knew if Mom realized she couldn't spend money the emotional firestorm would last for _days._

She also visited her mom, bringing her laptop and still doing her work, glancing up occasionally to mark heart rate and blood pressure, to look over the two catheters that had zillions of wires coming out of them, morbidly looking at the extremities that had ballooned up because of the medications, watch the diabetic face twitches.

After four days the doctors explained that they had diagnosed the problem – Mom had somehow contracted a fungal infection. How was anybody's guess. For now it was best to keep her under while they treated the problem. Katie looked at her mother, her swollen hands and open eyes, and for a brief moment she wished...

But she shook the thought off, horrified that she had even had it; instead she thanked the doctors and went home.

* * *

Two days later she got Matt's next message:

 _Pigeon,_

 _I've never seen Dad so excited – it's like he's literally vibrating in his chair. We can finally see Kerberos on our sensors. Tomorrow we'll be able get a visual Shiro says. Dad actually tried to get him to speed up, but Shiro laughed him off and said he was responsible for keeping all of us safe, so no can do. You can see him smile, though, when no one's looking – he's just as excited._

 _Finally got your message about picking an apartment – great choice, I was leaning to it, too. I checked it out on the drive to the launch site. Dad was surprised to know I was looking, and I explained the Plan. I know you wanted me to keep it under wraps, but we were going to be sitting on each other for two months just to GET to Kerberos. He said it was a very mature decision, and that if we had any trouble he would try to help financially. He even offered to tell Mom it was HIS idea!_

 _I know you're worried but it will all work out great. You'll see!_

 _Countdown: Two!_

 _Matt_

Katie stared at the message for a long, long time, dissecting every word and typo and comma. She took the whole day to come to terms with everything that was said, all the hope her brother had and the final good deed her father had done. She hurt. Like, she hurt _everywhere_ , and with Mom in the hospital she could take the time to feel everything, lay out on Matt's bed and stare at the ceiling and dream of what could have been.

She missed him. She missed her brother so much it was like all her energy was sapped away. She was moving from one crisis to the next and she had no idea what she was supposed to think or feel or do. Once the adrenaline faded she was so _tired_ and so _lost_ , and she _ached_ for her brother to be there to help her. She missed her Dad, too, but he could be away for a year at a time in space and she was... used to the absence. Matt had been the only source of sanity in her life; the only person who could give her all the support she needed in a single look. He was the only one who knew exactly what she was going through, because he went through it too.

She thought about all the times they would talk in the dead of night when the parents were asleep, just moan and complain about Mom and her being like she was. She thought of all the turns they took as no-good children and the unseen displays of solidarity. She thought of the rare times they were free, when Dad was home and they could run around and act like children. She thought about when they could have hacking contests, trying to break into each others laptops and do something silly like change backgrounds or play stupid chimes when programs were opened.

Katie wanted to go back to that, but she couldn't.

He was gone.

 _They_ were gone.

And they weren't the ones she _wanted_ gone.

But she didn't dwell on that thought too much, because if she did she wasn't sure she could survive whatever it took to get herself into the Garrison. She had been foolish in even deluding herself into thinking escape was possible. The only way she would ever be free would be when Mom passed away, and Katie was going to be a shriveled old woman when that happened.

The next day she went to the hospital, numb and a little tired, to see that Mom was awake. She couldn't talk, the doctors explained that she was dehydrated, and needed ice chips. She fed her mom dutifully – more than the doctors recommended because Mom kept asking (even as weak as she was, Katie knew in her bones that it would be safer to do as her Mom asked).

By the next week she was out of the hospital, and their first stop was to the pharmacy to get a truckload of medications.

That was when Katie learned that the insurance had run out.

"... What?" she had asked.

"I'm sorry," the pharmacist said. "You all were on your father's family insurance, and now that he's... passed... the insurance ran out at the turn of the month."

Katie blinked. "But... that was two days after Mom went to the hospital," she said. "She's been in there for eleven days!" She was already spending money on the lawyer, and the cars had just been paid off... they literally didn't have enough money in the accounts!

"We did what we could, Katie," the pharmacist said. "We filled all of her prescriptions the last day of her insurance, so she should have enough for the next month or so. We didn't know she was in the hospital, though."

Katie hummed, the enormity of what had just landed on her shoulders overwhelming her. There was no way... there was no freaking way they could pay off whatever the hospital bill was going to be _and_ pay off the debt _and_ pay the bills...! Mom's paycheck was pittance when she switched to working at home and she hadn't even gone back to work yet before going to the hospital and Katie couldn't get a job – let alone maintain it on top of everything else she was doing and...!

She held her head for a second, lost in the all the paths and sub paths of the problem, still trying to process what she could possibly do before she realized where she was: in public, and quickly detached.

"Thanks for letting me know," she said, and if her voice was a little watery, the pharmacist didn't say anything.

Mom was too out of it to explain, and Katie dreaded the day she would have to do it besides for the emotional turmoil her mother would churn up. Instead she helped her mother into the house, helped her change into night clothes, and put her to bed. Then she went to her room for yet another list of calls.

The insurance company explained the entire process gently but wouldn't budge on extending the coverage for another month – they would have to sign up all over again. Other insurance companies were happy to take their money and sign them up, but not back-date the coverage because of the hospital stay. She called the lawyer she had made an appointment with just because she didn't have any other ideas. The lawyer said the bill hadn't come yet and to therefore not worry about it.

Right. Like Katie had the option of not worrying about it.

Instead she distracted herself with doing the calculations necessary to figure out when Matt's last transmission would come. If she had at least one day to look forward to, maybe she could get through _this_ day.

Mom's recovery was steady from the weakness treating the infection had let her, and on her third day home Katie braced herself and went to the master bedroom. She kept her voice calm, neutral (she didn't have energy to fake being reassuring) as she explained the debt and the bills of both the cars and the lawyer and now nine of the eleven days of the hospital bill, all on top of the debt Mom had already incurred with all of her spending.

Mom's response:

"I don't believe it! How could your father do this to me? How could he leave me all this?!"

And then she fainted, because her body wasn't strong enough for her emotional histrionics. Katie blinked, a little surprised, a little scared. She tittered for several seconds on what to do before training took over and she bent over her mother, shaking her shoulder and asking if she was okay.

"No... this isn't happening..." her mother said, and she opened her eyes and just... went away.

Mom talked about how she used to do this as a child, after her parent's divorce and when the bullying got so bad; how she would sit on her front steps and pretend to be in a happy world. Katie had never seen her mother actually _do_ it, and for the next twenty minutes she just sat by her mother's side, waiting for her to come back. When she did Mom explained for the next hour everything that lead up to it, her anger at Dad for leaving her in the lurch like this, her hatred of the medical profession and the insurance companies who just wanted everyone's money, her hatred of herself and that she was the way she was. The Hermit and Waif sub-functions were warring with each other, and Katie sat and listened to it dutifully, nodding and talking when she needed to but mostly sitting at her mother's feet with her head down.

It was the next day, when Katie was back from school and doing her next round of calls, when her phone buzzed. She recognized the number as one of the hundreds of calls she'd made in the last month, and quickly picked it up.

It was one of the insurance companies – not the health ones, though, to Katie's disappointment. Life insurance. They explained that after looking into her father's records he had two plans under them, and rattled off the numbers for both payouts. Katie's voice cracked as she repeated the numbers back. Five hundred thousand... One hundred thousand... The numbers blurred as her eyes watered, and she thanked the person on the other line over and over. She went to Mom immediately with the good news.

"I don't know what the hospital bill will be but this will cover all the debt and that bill!" she said excitedly.

"That's wonderful!" Mom said, and for a brief moment they were both happy.

The payouts, however, when they came in the mail were made in the estate of Samuel Holt, not made out to Mom in name. Katie called the lawyer, confused, and he explained that the checks couldn't be deposited until after probate. Well, that was okay, Katie figured, and passed the information along. Mom was immediately worried that something would go wrong, because everything always went wrong I never have any luck because god hates me and enjoys seeing me suffer!

"It won't be that bad, Mom," Katie replied, "Once the lawyer signs off we can deposit the check and pay off all the debt and probably have a little left over to tide us over until we know what we can afford. I _can_ say that all the brand name spending is now a thing of the past."

She waited, expecting some kind of blow up, but Mom simply nodded. "That makes sense," she said, "Until our finances settle we shouldn't spend unwisely."

Katie blinked, surprised her mother sounded so... mature.

She wondered how long it would last.

* * *

Katie took an absence in school to go to probate, laptop in hand to take notes with the lawyer. The meeting lasted almost two hours, the lawyer going over everything in Dad's name – he didn't have enough assets to merit opening an estate (barely), but there were the two life insurance policies and the pension he garnered from his service in the military, which was generous given that he was part of the space program and one of their most experienced veterans. A lot of paperwork was signed, and Katie thought things were looking up. And they were, but the lawyer had one extra thing to say:

"And Katie, I know when you first called about getting some kind of power of attorney over your mother for when she's sick. It's a nice sentiment and a good decision, but you're not an adult yet. I can make the forms but your mother is going to have to choose someone else."

"But there isn't anyone else," Katie said, "Mom doesn't have any friends."

"Katie!"

"She's been alone since she moved down here for Dad's job and everyone she's talked to either weren't interested or were falsely judging her or accused her of-" Katie finally caught herself, changed her wording quickly "-of stuff. She works from home and doesn't leave the house. There is literally no one else."

"I'll find someone," Mom said quickly, all smiles and charm, and Katie knew the drive home was going to be terrible. "Don't worry about it. I'll call you later."

The meeting adjourned and Katie closed her notebook, trudging to the car and waiting.

"What were you _thinking_ telling the lawyer all those things about me?" Mom demanded.

"But it's the truth!" Katie said, knowing she was right and still upset the lawyer had told her no. "You always told us that the move down here was great for everyone except you! You had the story about Ginny Grouser who you would talk to after church but she always wanted to talk about herself – or that secretary at the church who got the priest to call you and tell you never to call again because you were abusive – or all the events you would go to and then moan about how they were inconvenient times or that they didn't involve the participant or that they were disrespectful to spouses like you – or that time Matt tried to join band and you made him stop because the shows didn't have a lot of adults to interact with!"

"But that's not _his_ business!" Mom shouted back. "Now that lawyer is going to think what's wrong with me that I can't make friends!"

"But you _can't_ make friends," Katie pressed, "That's not inaccurate, and that's why _I_ have to be the one with-"

" _I'm_ not the one who can't make friends!" Mom shouted, the small space of the car making it seem even louder. "I tried! I put in the effort! People here are all so self-centered! They have their own cliques and won't let anyone else in! All of the events and parties are at _their_ convenience, not their guests! _I_ have nothing to do with it and you made it sound like I did! You're just as self-serving as everyone here!"

"How is my wanting power of attorney over you to tell doctors how to help you self-serving?" Katie demanded. "How is wanting power of attorney to do the work _for_ you so you don't have to sacrifice any more than you already have self-serving?"

" _Because you're not doing it for me!_ " Mom shouted. " _You're doing it for yourself_! Honestly, how many times to I have to explain this? If you love someone, really love them, you include them in your thoughts. You ask their opinion about an idea you had, you arrive at the conclusion together! Your father never understood that and I guess _you don't either_."

Katie was beyond her borders. "So I'm like Dad now?" she asked. "Does this mean I'm evil, and ugly, and a narcissist, and the _Anti-Christ_?"

"I never said that!"

"Not today, do you want to know how many times you _have_ said that?"

" _You ungrateful bitch!_ "

Mom pulled over the car, so quickly that it clipped the curb and made it bounce; and Katie's mind finally caught up with her emotions, and she realized she was in trouble. Once the car was stopped Mom spun around in her seat and slapped Katie straight across the face.

" _Look what you made me do_! If there's a scratch on this car _your_ paying for it! In fact, you can pay your own way for everything! You can pay your school bills and hand over the cash for your phone and for your laptop! You may live in my house but _you are dead to me!_ I'll never speak to you again! I'll never drive you to school again! You want so badly to be on your own? _Fine_! You're on your own! _I'm not your mother anymore! Why didn't I die in that coma?_ "

There were other things Mom said, but Katie's ears were burning too much and she barely saw her mother burst into tears for the pain the woman felt. They sat in the car for a long time, Mom sobbing and sobbing, and Katie staying as still and silent as possible, wondering if this is what her mother felt when grandma was drunk and driving. She didn't even hold her cheek, as much as it burned, just kept her head down and said nothing. She watched as her mother finally put the car in gear, still sniffling, and finishing the drive home, and Katie was out the door and to her room before the car was even put in park. The rest of the day was silent, until dinner.

"You can have your dinner," she said in a cold, accusatory voice. "I'm not going to eat. In fact, I'm going to stop taking my insulin. So you just go and have your supper."

Katie rubbed her forehead. "Mom, please don't say that."

"I can say whatever I want, it's not like you _care_."

"Mom, I _do_ care, I promise!"

"You just proved to me this afternoon that you don't, so you go and have your supper. I'm not going to eat! I'm not going to take insulin!"

"Mom, I heard you the first time. I don't think sacrificing your health is a good idea. We don't need another hospital bill." Katie grit her teeth. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry I was so selfish earlier, and that I didn't see it right away. I was just really obsessed over the power of attorney thing, because I wanted to be able to do right by you, and I just got stuck in that way of thinking. I shouldn't have said the things I said, and I should have realized what I did wrong right away. I'd be really grateful if you decided you would be my mother again. I'll try to be more thoughtful of your feelings in the future."

Katie had said these words, in some form or other, all her life, but it didn't stop the feelings attached to the words.

"Well," her mother said, "I accept your apology, but we'll just have to wait and see about the rest. He said he'd think about my feelings, too. He promised over and over, and he always broke his promise. We'll see how you do."

Mom did decide to have dinner, and she did take her insulin. That moment crystallized for Katie, because she realized that Mom got what she wanted, she got Katie to apologize and say she would never hurt her mother like that again. The threat was a manipulation, a way to get what she needed from Katie. The talk of never being her mother again was never brought up, the slap to her face was completely forgotten about, then or any other time Mom made that threat.

And Katie didn't pick up on the deathwish until later.

* * *

It took a few days for Katie's mom to ring out the emotional onslaught the post-lawyer drive home had been. She spent many hours talking to Katie and repeating the story of her childhood and why she was so emotionally needy.

"What you don't understand, what you've never understood, is that I suffered abuse as a child," Mom said. "My mother was an alcoholic, my father emotionally abandoned me, I was bullied in school. Even your father abused me, it's been the story of my life. I know pain – deep, deep pain. And yes, that makes me sensitive, and I hate that about myself. But if you know this about a person, then wouldn't the natural reaction to seeing them in pain be to ask what's wrong? To ask what you can do to help? And Katie, you don't do that. You never do that."

"Yes, I do."

"You may think you do, but I never receive that message. Unlike your father I know you love me, but sometimes Katie you do things so opposite to that I question it."

"Then I'll just have to be better."

Katie endured the one-sided conversations until she felt safe enough to suggest they actually cash the checks so that they could pay off their substantial debt. Mom agreed and Katie risked thinking her Mom could deposit checks at the bank while she went to school. She stayed up until three in the morning catching up on homework and making a few cursory pokes at the calculations for the third message.

At school she turned in all her work and apologized to all her teachers. The grief counselor still wanted to talk, and Katie was starting to like it because it was the one safe place she could could think about her dad and brother without it being tainted by Mom. She didn't talk about the post-mortem messages, she didn't want her Mom finding out about them, and of course she didn't talk about the heavy stuff, about how Matt helped her when she was the no-good child and visa versa, but she could talk about what life was like when Dad was home from space, how happy those times where, and for one period a day it felt good instead of sad.

She actually had a conversation at lunch, someone asked about all the assorted parts at her table and she giddily explained that she was making a satellite dish to better hear communications from space. All her technobabble scared the person off, but it was nice to interact with someone her age, she hadn't done that since before the crash.

Then the last period of the day came, and Katie started looking to going home and the positive feelings bled out of her as she quietly started praying that everything went okay at the bank. She sort of remembered them being bought out, reading letters saying the name was changing and a new computer system was going to be launched. The more she thought about it the more she realized that a hundred things could possibly go wrong, and she silently hoped that she was wrong.

Except she wasn't.

Mom was sobbing when she came home, and eager to give the lurid story of what happened at the bank: they wouldn't accept her depositing the checks because it was made out to the "Estate of Samuel Holt," i.e. not in her name. An estate would have to be opened. But they didn't need an estate, Mom explained, the lawyer had said the assets too small to open one. She had even called the lawyer.

"He explained it over the phone," Mom said, "Said my certificate of release was a legal document. The bank still said no! They were saying no to a legal document – that's illegal! What other illegal things are they doing that we don't know about? Are they taking my money without knowing it? Now I have to go to another bank! How will my finances ever be settled at this rate? I'll be dead before they settle! Oh, _why_ didn't I die in that coma! I should have died first!"

Katie listened to all of it, picking out the relevant details before calling the bank to confirm the story – not that she didn't believe Mom, but her story was dripping with bias and Katie wanted a more analytical interpretation of events. (Though, the idea of Mom's witch subfunction activating _in public_ had never happened before and was cringe worthy to even imagine. Katie wasn't sure she'd ever be able to go to the bank again.) She called the lawyer and asked what they were supposed to do.

"I don't know," the lawyer said. "There's no legal reason for them to refuse the check, but financial institutions can change their internal rules without outside legislation, and if they've gotten that strict then litigation is sure to follow."

Her mother found that _very_ unhelpful. "We pay him all that money and he won't even help us? What good was he to begin with?"

"He settled all of our probate stuff," Katie said, rubbing her eyes and so, so _tired_. "And he released all of Dad's assets."

"But what _good_ is it? We'll just have to live in debt now! I'll have to give up my car, all my clothes. I'll become a pauper because of your _damn_ father! He must be laughing at me right now, and I hope he's burning in hell!"

"You don't mean that," Katie said, digging through her phone numbers for options.

"Of course I mean it! You father never loved me, he only ever tolerated me! He _hated_ me, and now I _hate him_ for what he's done to us! He made sure my life would be over if he died! He's got his revenge! He's made sure I suffer!"

"I doubt that," Katie said.

"Because you don't understand!"

And Katie was fed up. "No, _you_ don't understand," she said, finally turning to face her mother. "Dad did everything he could to take care of you. He stayed home after going to space so you wouldn't feel lonely. He covered for you when you had a bout of histrionics. Those aren't the actions of someone who hated you and wanted to see you suffer."

"And now I see whose side you were really on!" Mom shouted, and Katie belatedly realized her mistake: she didn't show Mom unwavering emotional support. "You hate me as much as your father did!"

"Mom," she said quickly, raising her voice to be heard, "I'm trying to fix this. I can't do that and be there for you at the same time."

" _You falsely judged me!_ Just like everybody else!"

" _Mom...!_ " But Katie knew she was past the point of no return, and even pulling back and being rational wouldn't deescalate the situation. The Witch sub-function had been activated, and Katie grabbed her laptop and phone and marched upstairs, yet again committing the sin of leaving her mother when she needed her, locked the door for the second time in her life, and sat behind her bed.

"You did it again!" she could hear, " _I should have beaten you as a child!_ Then you'd show respect! Open this door right now!"

This time her mother did not just shout at the door. This time she banged and twisted at the lock, the noise startling Katie and making her (more) scared. She tried to think abut solutions to the actual problem – finding a new bank or figuring out a way to deposit the estate checks – but the pounding and shouting and swearing were very, very hard to tune out. Katie eventually gave up and put her phone and computer down, just sitting in listening as her mother hurtled mean and nasty insults. Katie recited the list she had been told most of her life when the witch was active: she was insensitive, heartless, thoughtless, irresponsible, disrespectful, had no compassion, self-centered, self-absorbed, narcissistic like her father. Katie had heard them so many times that the words were almost meaningless.

Almost.

Katie pressed her forehead into her knees and waited for the storm to abate, listened to the twisting and fisting of the door, tried to dig herself deep into her brain where she couldn't hear the vitriol.

And then the door opened.

Katie spun around, shocked that the lock had failed, shocked that her one barrier to her mother had failed.

Mom burst into the room, just as shocked as Katie, but Katie recovered first.

"Are you done hurting me?" she asked, voice deliberately calm even though her insides were shaking. She would have to walk the line very, _very_ carefully.

"You _left!_ " Mom accused.

"You accused me of taking Dad's side when I've told you for as long as I can remember that I'm on your side. You wished you had beaten me as a child."

"But you caused it! You caused it by leaving me when I needed you most!"

"Those two things were said before I left," Katie said. "Those were the things that made me leave."

"That's a lie! All of those things happened after you left!"

"Then why did I leave?" Katie asked carefully. "What thing was said?"

"Stop twisting this around!" Mom shouted.

"I'm not." Calm voice, keep a calm voice; be logical and factual, sound as dry as possible. "You were upset about the check, and the lawyer explained that the bank probably instituted a new policy about accepting estate checks. You had every right to be upset, you had every right to feel frustrated and want to express it. You said it was Dad's fault and that he wanted you to suffer. I tried to correct you and say that Dad loved you. I understand that you didn't always feel it and that right now with the stages of grief it's really hard to see past the pain, and I understand why you would want to blame him, but if Dad really wanted to see you suffer he wouldn't have done the things I talked about: staying home so you weren't lonely, giving you those huge life insurance policies, looking after you when you were in the hospital. Your pain was too strong, though," Careful, careful... don't make an accusation, this is the trickiest part... "And I know that you've said you always struggle to see how Dad loves you. You accused me of being on his side and that I hated you, both of which are not true. I understand why it might have looked that way, and I could have worded it better, but my attention was split between trying to fix the problem and trying to be there for you emotionally like you need. I explained that to you and then you accused me of falsely judging you and said you should have beaten me. That hurt me, and I left instead of trying to defend myself and make things worse."

Katie held her breath, mentally checking off that she did everything she could to deescalate the witch and shut it down. If it worked, Mom would come back with...

"But you have to understand," Katie mentally sighed in relief. "My childhood was nothing but pain and misery. I can't help the way that I am – believe me if I could I would. I hate myself so much, but I can't stop it. If the dog downstairs was caught in a trap, he would be barking left and right, trying to bite at any hand that tried to help him. Does that mean you run away from the dog?"

Katie looked down, knowing where this was going. "No," she muttered.

"Exactly! You work past the bite and help the dog out of the trap. He'd be grateful for the help and love you. That's me! You have to show me support and be there for me, but when you leave me when I need you the most that cuts right to the core of my childhood. It's like I'm being punched in the heart, and that just makes everything worse!"

"So I have to listen to you threatening to beat me?" Katie asked. "I have to listen to you say that Dad raped you to have me?"

"I never said that!" Mom gasped. "What an ugly lie to say!"

"You did," Katie answered, mentally wincing that she had even opened her mouth. "The first time I locked myself up here."

"I most certainly did _not!_ "

"Well, that's the memory in my head," Katie said. "It hurt a lot to hear that, the same way it hurts to hear that I should never have been born or that I should have been beaten. I'd really rather not hear those things."

"Then don't _cause_ it!" Mom shouted. "Don't leave me when I need you the most!"

Katie gave up the fight after that. Fights always ended like this, where Katie(/Matt/Dad) were in the wrong and the thing that should have been done was to smile and nod through the terrible things, to say "Yes, I understand, I would feel that way too," irregardless of if they did or not, and listen to her as she ranted and raved at whatever thing was causing her the most frustration, tell her it was okay to be upset and that she had every right to feel whatever feeling she had, reassure her that the worst case scenario wasn't going to happen (irregardless of if they even knew whether it would or not) and tell her everything would work out.

And then it was up to them to find a solution to _make_ everything work out, because if it didn't she would hold that over their heads. That was Katie's current priority.

Two hours later, after Mom felt better, Katie opened up her laptop and put her headphones on, cranking the music up (no matter how dangerous that was if Mom needed to get her attention) to turn off her feelings and started researching banks.

* * *

 _Pigeon:_

 _OH MY GOD WE CAN SEE KERBEROS ON THE VISUAL SCANNERS. It's been getting bigger all day and I actually saw Dad GIGGLE in excitement. He filled out almost an entire notebook of data from the readings he's been getting and we haven't even landed yet. He's looking forward to getting ice samples and scans of the trace atmo and all he can talk about is carbon levels. You know how he is._

 _Shiro's actually gotten super-focused. He said landing is the most important thing a pilot can do and he's been pouring over all the readouts and the pictures to find a decent spot to land. Spent half the day in back checking the engines and the propulsion. Dad and I have a bet – the second he lands he's going to giggle just like Dad did._

 _Hoping Mom isn't abusing you too much – and yes, it's abuse. I can read your mind that you don't want to use a word so strong, but we have to call a spade a spade. No normal person says the things she does when she's mad, and no normal person gets as mad she does over the stuff she gets mad at. Two years and one month. It's the other, top-secret countdown, okay?_

 _Speaking of: Countdown: one!_

 _Shiro says if I send a video it'll take like a year to get to you, but I will try to snap a pic – file size will be smaller and you can show Mom that we all landed safe and she can stop imagining us being captured by aliens or something._

 _"See" you tomorrow!_

 _Matt_

Katie got the message in the middle of school. She saw the name and quickly asked to go to the bathroom. She read it three times, soaking up the words. It wasn't until a teacher came in looking for her that she realized how long she had been sitting there staring at the text, apologizing quickly and darting back to class. She spent all of her study hall processing and dissecting every word of text. This was the second time Matt had talked about the pilot Shiro being careful about landing – and going over that made Katie feel confused. How bad was the crash pilot error if this Shiro guy was being so careful about the landing...? But it didn't matter, wondering about it wouldn't change fate, and this was the last message from her brother. Nothing would be coming after this and something deep inside her ached to know these were his last words. She went to the guidance office of her own free will to talk about it. She talked about the messages from Matt, the plans they made (generally, no specifics), the time it took to arrive. How she felt about getting them.

After school she took her bike and visited three different banks. She explained about the probate and the estate checks and what the current bank was doing. Two of the banks were very honest, saying that they couldn't deposit the checks without opening estate. The third understood the circumstances and would gladly bend the rules for their circumstances.

Katie sighed in relief and opened her own account, transferred all her money from her college fund from her old bank, and then went over to said old bank to close her account there. She went home to explain the good news, and two days later she went with her mother to the new bank to open her accounts. The old account had to stay open until all the bills that were auto-draws were fully transferred. It was after business hours by the time they got home, and Katie spent the next afternoon making yet another round of calls to update billing information instead of doing homework.

… Why didn't Mom do this again?

Right, it was too hard because people were incompetent and everyone falsely-judged her.

She sighed.

The school year was coming to a close now; everyone was talking about their summer plans and the fun they were going to have. Katie knew her summer wasn't going to be fun, because with all the free time she would now be fully resourced to doing things for Mom. Day trips to the coast, visits to museums, taking tours of Galaxy Garrison; none of it would happen because Mom's hermit function would keep both of them home. Katie could only bike so far in the suburbia that they lived in – enough to go to the market for food shopping and enough to the thrift store if she needed clothes or spare parts for her laptop of her dish-

Except she should probably just stop constructing it. She'd already received his last transmission, what was the point of finishing it...?

Katie shook her head. She had to finish it, if only to distract her from her mother. She would need every project she could think of to survive the summer. She still had a year before she was old enough for Garrison and she had to put every inch of focus necessary into getting in. A year and nine months: 21 months. She repeated it to herself, over and over.

Wow, it had been four months since everything had happened...

And Mom hadn't gone back to work...

Katie started as she realized her mother hadn't gone back to work yet. That sent her diving back to the books to confirm – yeah, no paychecks for Mom. Only two of the widower checks from the government. Two days later the hospital bill came in and Katie realized that however generous the life insurance had been, the hospital bill still took a good twenty percent of it and that it wasn't going to last the fifty-odd years Mom still had in her – and this wasn't even getting into her spending habits. Mom _had_ to go back to work.

Katie took a deep breath and spent the first week of summer building her case. In between mowing the two-acre property and doing the laundry and cooking all three meals for both of them and cleaning the house from top to bottom – windows and all, she made a small presentation of her mother's financial state. She showed it to her on a Saturday and didn't even get to the third slide.

"I have the benefit checks," her mother said, visibly upset, "and the life insurance policies. That was supposed to set me up for life!"

"It would," Katie said, "If we invested it properly and didn't spend wastefully and you went back to work."

"But I thought I didn't _have_ to go back to work."

Katie bit the inside of her cheek to prevent the first three things she thought of. "Nobody ever said that," she said very carefully.

"They did!" Mom denied. " _You_ did! You said this would handle all the bills."

"No," Katie corrected, "I said it would handle the hospital bill."

"That's not what I remember, I remember you said specifically that this would handle _all_ the bills, and now it's all changed again! I'm trying so hard to get settled, I just want a little stability in my life – but no, God has other plans. 'Screw you!' He says, 'I'm going to make sure you _suffer_!' God's just saying, 'Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!' " Mom made the corresponding gesture in her anger, and while Katie couldn't turn off her ears she did avert her eyes, not wanting to witness the vulgarity.

"Oh, get over yourself!" her mother said, retaliating to the one small defense Katie had afforded herself.

"Mom, I don't think God appreciates things like that being said about Him."

"Like He even cares!"

The next hour was spent with Katie passively listening as her mother explained why her life was one big joke to God and why her childhood damaged her so badly. Katie reassured her that no, of course that wasn't the case, God was probably just busy managing new galaxies or playing with Dark Matter or quarks. Katie promised she would research more, but Mom didn't promise to go back to work, only that she would have to think about it as she muttered about the incompetence of the lawyer.

And Katie tried to do her research – she really did. But the stock market made _no sense_ to her. The numbers were all well and good – she understood percents since she was, like, four, but the market fluctuating up and down because of things like holidays and politics whistled over her head and she had _no idea_ what to do about investing the left over insurance money. She spent a week watching 24 hour consumer news stations, trying to absorb by osmosis what the market was like, but there were so many abbreviations and slang words and definitions and formulae that were talked about but never actually shown... Katie had no idea what to do and less idea on who to go to to ask for help. She finally called the bank to ask for direction. Her voice was watery again, and she stepped out onto the back deck in case of the off chance of Mom hearing her stress.

The person at the other line was very gentle. "I'm going tell you something I'm not supposed to," she said, "As a bank we do offer the kind of financing you're looking for, but the first thing you learn in this business is diversification. Look up a money manager so your eggs aren't being guarded in one basket."

Fourteen year old Katie had never heard of a money manager before, and when the call ended looked it up on her phone and started running searches on local managers and their review ratings. In a week she had a name on the way to the Garrison. She set up an appointment and grabbed every scrap of paper that had dollar amounts on it to take with her.

Mom was "too busy working" to help her (Katie saw social media windows. She knew what that meant.) so Katie took a deep breath and changed into her gym clothes for the four hour bike ride to the money manager. Panting and covered in sweat, she went to the nearest bathroom and changed into a green summer dress, pulled out her ponytail and all but dumped her head under the sink, getting water on it and her bare arms and legs to wash as much of the sweat out as she could. Fresh deodorant and a quick french braid later she was still flushed but had much more control over her breathing and didn't smell as bad. She took a slow, deep breath and exhaled. Katie threw her clothes into her bag and pulled out her accordion binder of paperwork, as ready for the meeting as she could be.

The secretary greeted her warmly and asked if she wanted anything. Katie got a bottle of water that she chugged immediately in one long gulp before asking for another for the trip home. As soon as she sat down she realized her legs were absolute _rubber_ and she dreaded the thought of getting up – which she did exactly five minutes later when a man with dark skin and a very nice suit came up and introduced himself and Mr. Benegyani. She was ushered to a small conference room and set in a plush leather chair, Mr. Benegyani sitting across from her.

"Now," he said warmly, "What can I do for you?"

The question didn't immediately hit the correct center of her brain, because the first sentence that came to mind was, _Please get me away from my mother_ , but she self-corrected before she even opened her mouth.

"My father and brother passed away earlier this year, and I don't know what to do with the finances. Mom can't do it because... because she can't and I've been trying for two weeks and I just don't understand what I'm doing – I mean the percents make sense, I'll be taking Calculus III next year and I understand all the _math_ but it's all the _other_ stuff that's driving me up the well – like everything is in abbreviations and that probably made sense in the olden days when computer tracking was from the stone age and could only be measured in megabytes but now it looks like code that I don't have a parser for and even trying to reverse engineer one didn't help because I realized some of these markets are in different languages and there's this weird human element; well, I say it's weird because everything is supposed to be automated now but if that were the case anybody with a basic knowledge of programming could ride the market and they don't so there are factors I'm probably not considering and-"

Benegyani held up a hand, soft smile on his mouth. "Your mother's obviously lucky to have someone as smart you to help her," he said gently.

Katie blinked, her thoughts skittering to a halt. She was used to people telling her she was smart, but it never occurred to her that her mother was _lucky_ to have her. Katie had always assumed she was a burden. She shook the thought off for later dissection, instead explaining everything that had happened since the news of her father and brother's death.

The loan sharks – as Mom called them – who had caused so much trouble over the cars were well known for similar acts to other clients of Mr. Benegyani's, and he wasn't surprised at all a bank had refused a released check for deposit because it was made out to an estate.

"It sounds like you've been through a lot," he said, his dark chocolate skin making the whites of his eyes pronounced and gentle at the same time. "It's a lot for someone your age to be handling; I can't even imagine how much your mother is struggling to lean on you so heavily."

Katie shrugged. "It's nothing really new," she said, rubbing her forehead. "I've been doing this since I was eight."

The response was a long stretch of silent, and Katie looked up to see a weird look on the money manager's face. Katie quickly switched her gaze to his shoulder, and held herself very still, instinct making her as passive as possible to survive whatever was about to happen next.

Instead, a warm, dark hand reached slowly across the table and wrapped around hers, a squeeze so strong and so gentle that Katie didn't know what she was supposed to do with it. She looked up and the weird look had changed to something much softer – a look she only ever saw on her brother and her father: understanding.

"Since you were eight?" he prompted gently.

Katie had no idea what to do with the question, a hundred different impulses firing through her nervous system in rapid succession. She realized her mistake immediately, and was cursing herself that she had just let someone in on one small piece of her life. But another, larger, overwhelming part of her wanted so badly to talk about it, to shout from on high what her life was like in the hopes that someone believed her, understood her, knew how to help her.

She needed help. She needed help so _badly_ and she didn't know where to go or what to do to get it.

"... yes?"

Her voice was small and confused, and honestly that was her life in a microcosm, and something big was happening and she was still trying to figure out if it was good or bad and how to react to it safely.

"Child," Mr. Benegyani said, "When I was your age I was trying to find a girlfriend and deciding on which sleepover to go to. You shouldn't be in charge of things this big."

Katie blinked, shocked to hear the echo of her brother in this man. She realized belatedly he wore glasses, and they were the same frame style as Matt's and his eyes were so warm...

"... it's fine," she said, her words no longer quick and concise. "I mean, life is so hard for her and she's been through so much, and-"

The warm hand squeezed again. "That's what she's told you," he said, "But are there other kids your age worrying about the things you're worrying about? For as long as you?"

Katie blinked, really thinking about the question. "... no..."

"Doesn't that tell you something?" Mr. Benegyani asked. "Do you think it's normal to be taking care of your mother at this age?"

 _No normal person says the things she does when she's mad, and no normal person gets as mad she does over the stuff she gets mad at._

"But..." Katie started to say, and she was thinking so hard she didn't even realize she was staring at Mr. Benegyani. All she could think about was Matt and his change while he was going to Galaxy Garrison, the freedom he talked about and the Plan to give her that freedom – him asking why she got Mom's prescriptions and pointing out what normal adults did versus their mother – remembering all the times she was the no-good child and how they all blurred together because no matter how all-good she was it was never enough and she could never completely avoid the witch function no matter how much work she did on the algorithm. She remembered the day she realized her life wasn't normal and how long she mourned it, and those feelings combined with all of the feelings she had over Matt's last message and what happened with him and Dad in space and _how much she missed them_ and how _tired_ she was all the time trying to keep track of everything and how intensely _sad_ she was that she couldn't share all of this even with the school counselor who was _supposed_ to help with this kind of thing.

When she finally came out of her own head her cheeks were wet, and there was a strong arm wrapped around her shoulders that weren't Matt's, and that's what made her finally look up to see Mr. Benegyani had sat next to her and rocking her back and forth. She felt safe in that arm, safe in a way that she never had before, and she was _terrified_ that she was feeling this way about a complete stranger. Just how desperate was she? Words poured out of her, things only Matt and Dad knew, and a piece of her mind was screaming at her to shut up, that this guy didn't know anything and wouldn't believe her – or worse, that he would pass it on to Mom and she would blow up – but her need to tell _someone, anyone,_ about what her life was like had completely overtaken her and it poured out of her, one gory detail after the next.

"Child," Mr. Benegyani said, "You do realize there are shelters for people like you, right?"

The question seared through her brain so suddenly it hurt, and she looked up dumbfounded.

"... what?" she asked, voice rough.

"There are shelters for children like you," he repeated.

Katie shook her head. "But... I'm not abused. She doesn't beat me, I don't have broken bones and stuff..."

"No you weren't beaten," he said. "But you shouldn't minimize what's happening to you; and you shouldn't think physical abuse is the only kind that can be measured."

Katie heard the words but didn't understand them, couldn't comprehend that the word her brother had used so emphatically in his last message to her could be used by someone totally outside of her life, someone who didn't know her from a hole in the wall. The thought was so profound she didn't know what to do or say or think or react. She shrank from the thought, not ready to have it yet.

Mr. Benegyani sensed the change, withdrew his arm and took his original seat, looping his warm fingers together and taking a breath. "Well, then," he said, "I'm not the person who can convince you. But I hope you at least think about it. Do you want to show me what finances you have? That I'm an expert on."

He didn't bring up her break down for the rest of the meeting, and he never once asked a leading question about Mom, for which Katie was eternally grateful. He explained what he could and couldn't do, and very gently let her know that because she was a minor she would have to bring in her mother for a proper meeting.

After that was another four hour bike ride to the house, and between the exertion and the emotional roller coaster Katie microwaved a dinner and ate in her room before collapsing to bed.

* * *

The next morning she explained the meeting to her mother, and they made a new appointment. Mom was hesitant to go, her hermit function and her waif working together to make her almost back out of the meeting. It was so far away, and what if the man judged her? What if she didn't understand what he was talking about? What if she was too stupid to understand?

Katie listened to all of it and, quietly, insistently, reminded her of the appointment and that she shouldn't break it.

While she waited for the day to arrive she kept tinkering with her satellite dish. The hardware was all assembled but there must have been some bug in the software, because she kept getting this weird feedback loop; a repeating signal that she couldn't identify once she eliminated white noise and other variables. It was a problem that niggled in the back of her mind, but she put it away as she sat in the back with the hair dryers and the medication and the spare clothes in case the car broke down and they had to stay somewhere overnight. She followed her mother up to the office and Mr. Benegyani took them immediately. Katie very carefully said nothing, did not want to bring up her break-down with her mother sitting right next to her.

The money manager made his case, explained what he could do. "Your husband obviously loved you," he said, "Because of the things he did to make sure you were taken care of after he was gone."

"That makes me happy," Mom said, "I just wish he looked after my emotional needs as much as my physical needs, but he was always like that."

Katie bit her lip.

"Well, the good news is that this money will last you a good thirty years, and it's my job to make it last more than that. Your daughter said you work?"

"Not since my husband and son died," Mom said. "I haven't been able to bring myself to work."

"I can understand that. It takes time, and young Katie said it was several months ago. How many sick days are you allotted?"

Mom blinked. "What does that matter?"

"I'm just surprised a workplace is so generous with their sick days, unless your coworkers are pooling their sick days to cover for you. Either way, it must be a wonderful place to work."

"It's a horrible place to work," Mom corrected. "The manager is abusive, and everyone's in their own clique, and if you work form home like me you're screwed over."

Mr. Benegyani shrugged his shoulders. "It was just a question. Still, one of the best things to do to make this money last is to start drawing your paycheck again. Between that and the survivor pension you have enough to finish paying off the house and pay all of your bills. The rest of this can be sunk into the market and grow so you can have a comfortable retirement."

"And what if I don't want to go back to work?" Mom asked, and Katie was suddenly paying acute attention.

"If that's your choice we can do that, too; but Mrs. Holt you're still young and obviously healthy, I wouldn't recommend such an early retirement."

"Mom," Katie said, "We can't afford it. We have to make that money last, you _have_ to go back to work."

Katie saw the switch flip immediately, she turned and _looked_ at her daughter, looked like she did when she broke down the door or when she was yelling at Dad when he was still alive. Katie had falsely-judged her, _somehow_ , and she was going to pay the price on the drive home. The fourteen-year-old stopped taking notes, survival instincts pulling her eyes down to stare at the table and be as still as possible, her ears burned and filled with static, all she wanted to do was ask what she did wrong so she could backtrack and save face somehow, deescalate the raised voice before it even rose.

Mom signed a lot of digital forms, her voice was cool and she ignored Katie completely – easy to do, because Katie had stopped talking and was being as still as possible. The meeting must have looked great to an outsider, but Katie was ticking down the clock to them being alone – would it be in the hallway? Or the car? Or would Katie get the silent treatment until dinner? She preciverated in her head, and when they left she cast one desperate look to Mr. Benegyani, who had listened to everything she had confessed, who understood. He put a warm hand on her shoulder, and mouthed something, but Katie couldn't read the lips. She shook her head, communicating she didn't understand, desperate for something, _anything_.

"Katie, come on," her mother said.

And just like that her chance was gone, she had to follow. She kept her eyes to her shoes as she followed Mom to the car, listened to the deafening silence on the ride home, and was allowed to go to her room. She didn't _dare_ lock the door, instead put on her headphones and tried to distract herself until the explosion came.

At five-thirty Katie got up and started cooking supper, and she knew it would be any minute that Mom would come down and start talking at her, and Katie would be locked in front of the stove cooking, unable to escape, and forced to interact with her when the witch subfunction was active.

"Katie, I want to talk to you."

She took a deep breath. "Yeah?" she asked, sounding calm. She didn't turn from the cookpot.

Her mother sighed. "Katie, I know you're young, and that you don't have any real life experience. I've tried to teach you about it by explaining my childhood and the abuse I went through, but someday I'll have to learn that until you live it you will never understand it. I have to come to terms with the fact that you'll never understand me – I understand that. But you have no right whatsoever to dictate my life to me like you did today."

Katie played at being confused, even though she now knew exactly what had upset her mother so much. "How did I dictate your life?" she asked.

"When you ordered me to go back to work," her mother said. "The money manager was explaining how I had enough that I didn't need to go back to work and you turned and looked at me with such hatred, such contempt, and demanded that I had to go back to work. You said we couldn't afford it like you know anything about my finances."

"Mom," Katie said, "I _do_ know about your finances, I've been going through them since the crash. I know all about the refinancing and the debt and the loans – it was my idea to go to the money manager in the first place."

"You _think_ you know," her mother corrected, and Katie kept her eyes to the floor. "But I will _repeat_ , you don't have the life experience. You haven't paid bills, you have it _easy_ right now. You have no right to judge whether or not I should go back to work. You _know_ how abusive they are at the lab, it's why I decided to work from home in the first place. I _told_ you the stories about Mohrety deliberately switching vials to make people look bad, I _told_ you the story about me crying in the break room, I _told_ you about how they all talked behind my back when I decided to work from home. I tell you and tell you and tell you but you just proved today that you didn't believe one word I said."

"I _do_ believe you, Mom," Katie said, "I promise. I can recite all the stories chapter and verse, and I understand how all of those things affected you, and you have every right to feel stressed at the thought of going back to work – but Mr. Benegyani said it would be better if you go back to work, and I know you spend enough that we _have_ to make all that money last and it would be _easier_ to do it if you went back to work."

"That _I_ spend enough?" her mother said, tone changing immediately. Katie cursed at herself. "You make me sound like some aristocrat that doesn't know money!"

"Mom, there's no reason to keep buying brand names if you're not going out anymore – there's no one to impress and it makes more financial sense to be frugal!" … Why was she defending herself? Why was she trying to prove she was right to her mother? This was going to end badly, but why was she still trying?

" _You think I do this to impress people?_ "

"No, Mom, that wasn't what I meant-"

"You judge me like everybody else!"

" _No_ , Mom, I'm just saying-!"

" _That's it!_ We're through! I am not your mother any more! You're dead to me! You can live in this house but I'll never speak to you again! You can have you're supper, I'm not going to eat. In fact, I'm going to stop taking insulin! I'll just go into a coma and die like I should have!"

"Mom, I'm trying to say-"

But her mother moved to the kitchen drawers and pulled out a steak knife, holding it over her wrist. Katie reacted before she even had time to process the image, let alone think about what was happening. She jumped forward and wrapped her fist around the blade; Mom pulled back, the knife scrapping against the inside of Katie's fingers but she held firm through the blood and wrapped her other hand around her mother's, struggling for several seconds to get it out of her hand before she succeeded. The knife clattered to the floor and her mother wailed.

"Please God!" she shouted, "Strike me down now! Let me die! Free me from this world of pain!"

Katie hugged her mother tightly, hoping that would prevent her from doing anything else, afraid to say anything to make it worse.

Mom crumpled into sobs and wails, and Katie held her, rubbing her shoulders and back, careful not to get her bloody fingers to stain her mother's expensive blouse. They stayed that way for... who knew how long, but Mom had her supper and through her tears talked about her abusive childhood, about how she had no control of her life then, and no control of her life now. She talked about how she loathed having more control taken from her, how she didn't completely trust the money manager no matter how well the meeting went because she was giving up control of her money to him. She talked about how her own daughter tried to control her, tried to tell her to go back to a place that made her miserable an how deeply, deeply hurt she was. She talked about how that pain added up and how she couldn't take it anymore.

"That's why it's so important," she said. "That's why it's so important that you understand. _You_ are the only reason I'm hanging on. _You_ are the only reason I'm still alive. _You_ are my sole source of happiness."

And all Katie could feel were chains around her neck and wrists, because now she knew if she wasn't perfect she would be responsible for her mother's suicide. She couldn't call a helpline, the betrayal that would cause would be irrevocable, and she couldn't ask for help without her mother finding out she was airing dirty laundry. She was the only one who kept her mother alive, and Katie _hated_ the new burden that had been put on her shoulders.

But she nodded and listened, knowing she would effectively never be allowed to defend herself again for fear of another stunt like this.

… why didn't Mom care about how this affected her daughter?

But Katie knew better than to ask, and when she went to bed that night she prayed for a deep, dreamless sleep.

* * *

Right up until her phone vibrated at 2 a.m.

Even with her late nights Katie's phone never went off simply because nobody else was up at that hour, and hearing it vibrate was a strange enough sound that she woke up, grabbing it from her nightstand and activating the screen.

 _Email: We made it Pigeon!_

She blinked, staring at the notification with an empty head, unable to comprehend what she was reading. She sat up slowly, wincing at the gauze and tape on her fingers pulled at the knife cuts, unlocking her phone and opening the app. There was no text, just the subject line and an attachment. Her fingers were trembling, her phone was shaking, _she_ was shaking as she stared at the mail, so many emotions filtering through her she didn't quite know what to do. She could only perciverate for so long, though, before she pulled her hair back to make sure she had a clear view of her phone as she opened the attachment.

It was a photo. Time and distance had made it dithered, pixelated, partially corrupt. There were lines of noise, lost data still flying through space somewhere, but Katie could make out three very distinct space suits taking a selfie – not in a compartment of the shuttle, but against a black backdrop of space, the white ice landscape being only one possible place: Kerberos.

They... they made it.

There was no pilot error.

Captain Shirogane didn't crash the ship.

Oh my god...

"Mom!"

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** This chapter is the most painful to read, because the dialogue is pulled from actual conversations/fights that we had in our lives. The drive home from the bank where Katie is slapped across the face? The threat to repossess cars and being yelled at for simply hanging up a phone? Not being able to deposit a check because it's made to an estate that was never opened? The hospital stay was much earlier though, in our lives, and was covered by insurance. The one-off hospital stay for low blood sugar levels, though, was done on the last day of the insurance coverage. The debt was real, so much of ourselves is in this chapter that we're not really reading fanfiction, we're reading a heavily edited documentary of our lives.

Because it's a fic we could only squish all of these events down to a microcosm, it's hard to understand that those deescalation techniques that Pidge/Katie does to prevent the worst from happening were weekly, sometimes daily occurrences. It's hard to articulate how long those days are, when the witch is active and hours, even days are spend trying to shut down the subfunction; how stressful and miserable life gets when those moments happen.

We're not cruel to Katie/Pidge, however. She does get a grief counselor, something that doesn't parallel us because Katie is much younger when she loses her father, and schools are very sensitive to things like a child's mental health after a loss like that. As consumed as Katie/Pidge is she at least has one safe space to talk. She doesn't understand that this is the place to talk about _everything_ , but we ourselves didn't learn that until we were much, much older.

Because everything that happens is so condensed, and most especially because Pidge/Katie is so _young_ , there are some things that just can't translate over. One thing we couldn't reasonably establish is to get her to learn the name of her mother's dysfunction, but we did work it into the title of the fic and one reviewer has already picked up on it.

Next chapter: The Green Paladin is inquisitive and daring - and Pidge does the most daring thing in her life.

PS: OMG season four dropped last night and THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH WORDS to describe the feels of Pidge's episode! I didn't think we could make that many squealy-happy-noises!


	3. Loss of Home

**Part Three: Loss of Home**

Nobody was at Galaxy Garrison to take their phone calls, or at least nobody was awake at the phone center. Katie downloaded the photo to her laptop and ran it through every program she had. There weren't a lot of major landmarks in the photo to mark where on Kerberos they were, but she did have enough stars in the picture to reverse engineer their orientation to confirm that _yes_ , this picture could _only_ be taken from Kerberos. The space suits were accurate down to the last detail, and while Dad's face was a little garbled Matt and Shirogane's were clear enough to run through a facial recognition she had written one summer for fun. It was them. It was really them. They had _made_ it, and the Garrison had _lied_ about it.

Mom drove them down first thing in the morning and Katie marched through the door, laptop in hand, and slammed it down on the desk of the secretary, demanding to speak to the person in charge so he could explain _this_.

They were taken to Lieutenant Commander Iverson's office. The man had deeply tanned skin, a thick nose, and a barret that made him look intimidating. Katie would not be deterred, however, not with hope in a .jpg form in her hand, not with the sliver of an idea that she wouldn't be alone to suffer her mother any more, not with the vaguest chance that her nightmare could end, not with the thought of her family _up there in space_ while she was stuck in a house feeling sorry for herself. No. Not an option. She slammed the laptop down in front of him.

"There was no crash," she asserted. "Whatever instruments you had were wrong."

"What is this?" Iverson demanded.

"This is an email that's traveled five billion miles and change and took six months to get to me. This is a selfie taken by my brother Matt with my dad and Captain Shirogane. This is proof that they never crashed. Now do you want to explain why you lied to the public and to us and what _actually_ happened?"

Iverson looked at the laptop for a long time, one eye squinted shut before looking up to glare at Katie. Katie glared right back, because he was nothing more than an obstacle blocking her from her father and brother. She had a goal now, something outside of watching Mom try to kill herself to convince her daughter to stay by her side, something outside of waiting for Mom to pass away before she could be free – she could be free with her brother, but first she just had to _get_ to him.

"Colonel," Iverson said, and a man in uniform all but appeared by his side. "Take our two guests to the conference room to get their statements. I'll have to take the laptop and have it surveyed by our IT, make sure this isn't a hoax."

"Sir, yes, sir!"

Mom didn't have much to say, but this was Katie's show. She told them about the family communications, about the emails she and her brother traded. She talked about the software she had run the photo through on her laptop to confirm it's authenticity. The colonel nodded and wrote it all down, but otherwise gave no indication that this was more important than noting a meteor shower or Haley's comet.

"Don't you get it?" Katie demanded, leaning in on her chair. " _They're alive_. That means they're out there somewhere, we have to see who's on the international space station, see if anyone there has the qualifications for a deep space rescue. We have to find out what really happened to stop communications. They could be hurt up there – they have enough food rations for now if they're careful but we have to hurry and scramble a team to save them. What about that new prototype that was circulating the space journals? Has construction started on that yet or do we have to use the XJ061? We can at least use those high-efficiency engines that came out last month, the fuel projections would shave a good two weeks off the journey and that's assuming we don't stress them too much and—"

"You know an awful lot about our program," the colonel said.

"That's my _dad_ up there," Katie said, "You know, Commander Holt? Spent a third of his life in deep space? _And_ that's my brother, Matt up there. Of _course_ I know!"

They sat there, the colonel recycling his questions over and over, and Katie was fed up with telling them everything when it was so _obvious_ what needed to be done. It was three hours later when Iverson came in, squinting at the two women with a carefully controlled look of contempt.

"You led us on a merry chase, Ms. Holt," Iverson said. "But our computer geeks are smarter than you think they are. They're impressed, it's a very good fake, but it's still a fake."

… What?

"What? _What?!_ "

Katie was on her feet in an instant. "It's not a fake!"

"It is," Iverson said. "You've wasted time and resources and pulled your own mother into this farce. What did you expect to gain from it?"

Katie was beside herself. "Why are you lying?" she demanded. "Why are you trying to tell me this was a fake unless-" It clicked in her head, and the shock of it nearly took the wind out of her. The shock quickly turned into fire, however, and after that all she saw was red. " _What are you hiding_?" she demanded. "What do you know that you didn't tell the press, that you didn't tell _us_? That's our family up there! We deserve to know!"

"Colonel, escort the Holts out of here."

"Sir, yes sir."

Katie ducked the arm that wanted to guide her. "You can't be serious! You can't seriously expect me to just walk out of here and not post this everywhere! The entire world is going to know that you're covering something up!"

"Not if you don't have any evidence," Iverson said.

Katie blinked. The laptop, the laptop, _where was her laptop_? "What did you do!" she shouted, moving around the table. "What did you do to my laptop?"

"Nothing, Miss Holt," Iverson said. "You'll get it when you leave."

" _I'm not leaving!_ "

"Katie."

And survival instinct made her freeze, color draining from her face as she turned to face her mother.

"We're leaving."

"But _Mom_!"

"Say another word," her mother threatened. "Go ahead. Say another word."

And just like that it was over. They walked out of the building, handing Katie her laptop, and were escorted to their car and followed until they were off the campus. Katie opened her laptop and started booting it up, immediately searching for the file. It wasn't there.

"They deleted the file," she muttered. "Okay let's see how good those 'computer geeks' think they are." She dug deep into her harddrive, sifting through her custom made partitions and firewalls, but there was nothing. Even old files that were partly overwritten were wiped. They had reformatted her hard drive and zero'ed out her memory. Those _bastards_! Cursing, she pulled out her phone and opened her email, but they had done more than work on hardware, her email account had been scrubbed of all mail from her brother, even the countdown emails, even the emails that had come from before the "crash." She opened a backdoor to the server of her email and looked through her account that way but even backups had been erased. The bastards had even used her wi-fi connection to clean out her very phone, every scrap of data that had to do with her brother was gone. Even the apartment searches.

"... they deleted it," she mumbled. "They deleted _all_ of it..."

In a fit of rage she slammed her laptop into her lap, the stinging slap throbbing through her body as she did it again and again. How dare they. How dare they...!

"Mom, we need to go back, we need to hack into their computers, find out what they did with all my files and logs, they hold one of the space stations backup servers, there might be data there to explain why-"

She saw her mother's face, and it felt like Katie stepped out of her own body, finally drifted outside her world of moral outrage and righteous indignation and realizing she was already swimming in bloody waters. Replaying the morning from an outside perspective – specifically _Mom's_ perspective – and she realized just how she sounded. And for Mom in particular, who was so hyper sensitive about people falsely-judging her, now witnessing people judging her daughter as crazy and _making her look bad_... This was a betrayal. Katie wanting her family back was about to be twisted into a betrayal of the highest order, the screaming would last for hours, and Katie couldn't back down from this, couldn't let her mom walk over something this important and sweep it under the rug... and since Katie wouldn't apologize for her transgression Mom would push harder and harder to get what she wanted. Would she disown her again? Threaten to kick her out of the house? Promise to stop taking her medication? Try to kill herself again? Katie's band-aided fingers throbbed at the very thought.

Her mother hadn't yet come down off of the roller coaster yesterday, plus the emotional upheaval when Katie had woken her in the middle of the night to tell her the good news, and now the good news was twisted to something else, and all Katie wanted to do was run away.

* * *

As soon as they were in the house her mother started yelling, and for the first time in her life she yelled right back, unwilling to believe the lie that Iverson had told, unwilling to accept that her father and brother were dead with all of Matt's messages talking about Shirogane being careful and the selfie that _her own mother saw_ to confirm they had survived the landing. She would make as much noise as necessary to save her family.

"Why can't you understand?"

"No," Katie said, "Why don't _you_ understand that they're alive and out there?"

"Why are you so desperate to hurt me? Why do you want to see me suffer?"

"I _don't_ want you to suffer! I want to get Dad and Matt back!"

" _At the expense of me!_ "

" _And they are worth it!_ "

And Katie was slapped across the face again, hard enough for her neck to snap to the side.

" _Why do you always do this to me? Why do you hate me so much?_ " And then her mother just screamed, loud enough to reverberate around the house, the right pitch to set Katie's entire nervous system on edge. She took a breath and just screamed again, and a third time, and a fourth, and Katie ran to her room, the only safe place she could think of, hid behind her bed and tried to unhear the noise.

The screaming subsided, eventually, but Katie didn't dare leave her room, was too scared to even go the the door and lock it – no matter how much she needed to and no matter how little use it was now that she knew her mother could break down the door if needed. The silence was almost worse than the screaming, Katie didn't know what she was supposed to do, see what happened to her mother or wait for her mother to come looking for her? The safest thing to do was find her mother and listen to the vitriol, it would be worse if her mother expected her to come and she didn't.

Katie took a deep breath, and another, and another. Finally, her legs allowed her to move, and she stood. The door took another round of deep breaths, but she managed to open it.

The silence was deafening after so much noise, and Katie's socks padding over the carpet of the house seemed to have a hollow ring to it. Her mother was still in the kitchen, sitting at the table, staring off at nothing. Just like when she had come back from the hospital. She had gone away again, lost in her own mind.

Katie could only feel relief – for a few minutes she would have a reprieve.

(She didn't think about whether or not she should feel guilty about that feeling, or whether it was healthy for her mother to just go away like that.)

She went back to her room, shaking, and sat behind her bed again. It was hard to think, her brain was stuffed with other things, so many things, but she knew that everything was different now. She couldn't stay in the house if her family was out there in space, waiting to be rescued – that was untenable. She needed to get out there, she needed to save them, she needed to bring them back so she could survive her mother. But how could she do it? How would she even know where to go, with Galaxy Garrison having wiped everything off her phone and cloud accounts?

… Galaxy Garrison...

Katie knew what she had to do.

* * *

She disguised the trip as telling her mother she was meeting with her robotics class, that it would take all day and she'd be back late. Katie had been very careful, kept her laptop out of her mother's view at all times, listened extra hard and expressed extra sympathy over all the day to day worries. She agreed that she was at fault, that she should never have shown Mom the message and wasted their time over a cruel fake. She promised that she would be more considerate of Mom's feelings.

None of it was true.

Instead Katie brushed up on her calculus, looked over the latest programming code and protocols for space travel, read every page and subpage of the website.

Hacking Galaxy Garrison remotely had lead to people coming to her house and giving her a stern talking to in front of her mother. The explosion after that lead to more incoherent screaming and disappearing, Katie wasn't going to back down, and it was worth the abuse if she picked up anything from the depths of the Garrison server. When that didn't work she waited until nightfall, took a bus all the way to the garrison, and snuck in to hack their intranet. That had lead to Iverson escorting her out and calling her mother again, but at this point she had given up listening to her mother. Only one thing mattered: finding Matt and Dad. Mom threatening to disown her? Accusing her of not loving her? Wishing she were dead? Trying to take another knife to her wrist? Having low blood sugars and screaming when someone talked to her? Katie went through all of it because she knew that once she found her brother and father it would all be worth it, that she would have a way to come back home and... and be okay.

Because nothing was okay right now.

It hadn't been okay. Not for years. Perhaps not since Katie was born.

Instead she said she was with the robotics club for a summer project and biked three hours to the high school the next town over. Everyone was assigned a room and given a test booklet. Katie looked at the bubble sheet – from the dark ages, really? - and gave a lot of thought to her name.

Pigeon was the obvious choice, she would at least answer to it, but writing the name of an animal wasn't going to fly. The first syllable, Pig, was still an animal, and adding the e for Pige would have been a pain for people to know how to pronounce. Instead, she wrote Pidge. Last name? Well, this wasn't about her education, it was because Iverson had lied for some kind of shit reason – or rather, a dung reason. She rearranged the letters, _dung reason,_ to Gunderson, dropping the a. She bubbled it all in, listed her birthday as one year prior to her actual birth to meet the age requirements, and giving her own address and praying nobody would cross check it with her real name. She looked at the gender box and took a long, deep breath. If Iverson was looking for a girl, if she was dressed as a girl, then he would recognize her. Better to be as different as possible. Male.

The entrance exam was... easy wasn't the right words. Even though she was a year younger than she was supposed to be she knew every question on the exam, the work wasn't hard, but she kept expecting someone, Iverson or some similar phantom, to come in and drag her away. She kept expecting the proctor to ask why her gender was flipped on the test. She kept expecting something to go wrong. But it didn't.

She waited three agonizing weeks, checking the mail religiously, waiting for the ruse to fall apart, for something to go wrong.

But, Pidge Gunderson got his acceptance letter. Katie didn't feel relief, just satisfaction that her next step was going to be put in motion. She told her mother absolutely nothing, and simply planned.

Essentials: a few days of clothes, toothbrush and toothpaste, Matt's old glasses, her contacts, her laptop, the small satellite dish she had made. Her photo of her and Matt at the space station. She wished very badly she had a photo of her dad that was personal and not from the news, something with her in it. Underwear, deodorant, one shampoo bottle.

She very carefully pulled out an old luggage bag and hid it under her bed. She wrote all the things she would pack on a sticky note as a checklist and placed it there. She pulled up maps to Galaxy Garrison – it was a two hour drive, she was afraid how long it would take with just her bike. No, her bike would be recognizable, she needed a replacement for it. That had caused a lot of stress for three days before she bought a bike off of a little boy a few streets over and stashed it an hour from the house.

She could check into hotels under Gunderson's name, but that was assuming she looked enough like a boy to pass. She put on her gym clothes, cutoffs and a loose tee, and decided she was passable enough if she cut her hair. She ran her fingers through her tresses and... not yet.

She went to the bank and drew from her account – only to discover that her mother somehow knew her account information and had been pulling from it – that was why Mom's accounts looked okay, she had been pulling from Katie's college funds. Katie couldn't even feel surprised, nothing in that house was really _hers_ except her laptop and her satellite dish, both hand crafted by her and never once touched by her mother. Everything else, even her own room, were part of Mom's domain as the queen subfunction, and Mom therefore had a right to all of it. That was why locking doors meant nothing, it was her _mother's_ house and Katie therefore had no right blocking her from anything. Staring at her bank account, she liquidated it and closed the account, putting the money in her luggage bag under her bed and quietly packing the other things on the list.

Clothes and toothbrushes would have to be the last minute.

She bought a disposable phone and transferred all her numbers over to it in case her mother was smart enough to track her with the cell's GPS. It was cheap and not nearly as powerful as her old one, but it would make her invisible.

She had it all planned out: leave the night before. No note, no word, just disappear.

All she had to do was last until the end of summer.

All the had to do was last.

All she had to do...

She couldn't do it. She couldn't stand the idea of being with her mother for that long, not knowing the family that... (mattered loved her understood her didn't yell at her thought she was worth something) knowing that family out there needed her and she wasn't doing anything.

It started on a Wednesday. Katie had come to go to the pharmacy to pick up Mom's prescriptions, two of them. She picked them up but the pharmacist said that the third wouldn't be in for a while yet. Katie didn't know what that meant but shrugged and biked back to the house. She left the groceries on the kitchen table and went up to the office with the prescriptions to give to her mother.

"Here you go."

Mom opened the bags while Katie waited for dismissal.

"Wait, why do you have my humalog?" she asked. "I just put that order in this morning, I'm shocked they even have it. Where's the lisinopril?"

Katie shrugged her shoulders. "You wanted me to pickup two prescriptions," she said, ticking her head to one side as the bottom of her stomach dropped out. "They gave me two prescriptions."

"But this isn't the one I ordered! I mean I did order it but you wouldn't have known that. Did you ask about the other prescription?"

Katie blinked, thinking back. "Well, the pharmacists did say one of them wouldn't be ready until later."

"And you didn't think to ask what she meant?" Mom asked, her voice rising.

Katie shook her head. "I was picking up other things, I wanted to make sure I remembered them."

"Well you're just _selfish!_ " her mother hissed.

Katie stared for a second as the entire day crystallized in her head. She had seen this so many times she could predict the events: The morning would be the silent treatment and the only reprieve she would get. Mom would post about all her woes online and receive support – maybe – from her followers and then at lunch the drama would begin. Mom would shuffle down while Katie was cooking and tell her not to bother with cooking her lunch, say she's too depressed and had decided to stop taking her insulin. Katie would spend anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour coaxing her to eat because of her diabetes and to make sure that she took care of herself, and then lunch would be tensely silent while Mom made verbal digs about nobody supporting her and wishing someone cared about her, trying to manipulate Katie into saying she cared and then segueing into why she didn't.

Katie wouldn't do that, however, and wouldn't apologize for being a normal human being and not asking a question because other things were on her mind. That would lead to Mom dialing up the pressure, until she either walked in on Katie in the middle of the afternoon to express her feelings or dump it all on her while Katie was cooking and effectively trapped in the kitchen.

Katie predicted all of this, and for the first time in her life she asked herself, _is it worth going through?_

Her response? _No._

It wasn't worth being childishly ignored, it wasn't worth being manipulated into apologizing for something that was _normal_ , it wasn't worth being yelled at and demeaned and diminished. It wasn't worth trying to defend herself to have everything she said metaphorically erased because Mom's feelings mattered and Mom's feelings were more important and Mom's feelings had to be forgiven because she spent her entire life abused and Katie needed to be more understanding and supportive and love Mom enough to meet her needs because she was sacrificing so much and to be so disrespected was an insult and she should never have had her and she was just as bad as her father and she was selfish unthinking uncaring irresponsible insensitive stupid and _ugly like your father and I've wasted my money trying to raise you and I wish I died in that coma and maybe if I died you would know how good you had it!_

Katie went to her room, pulled out her luggage bag. She changed into her gym clothes and grabbed four decent outfits to throw in. Her laptop and satellite dish went in an over-the-shoulder back. She took her pillow from her bed and silently padded downstairs, putting on her sneakers and wrapping it all up on her bike. She walked her bike down the street, and down the next street, and then got on it and pedaled for everything she was worth.

That was how she Escaped.

That was how she started her Mission.

That was how she became homeless.

* * *

Katie biked hard, working up a sweat and not stopping until she was two hours away. She went to a sandwich place and changed to new clothes in the bathroom. Between that and the new bike and the disposable phone she should be a new person. She pulled her hair into the tightest french braid she could muster, making her hair look a lot shorter and clipping it up in one of her brother's old baseball hats. When she looked in the mirror, green shapeless shirt and hat, she considered it a pass until she could cut her hair. She ordered a foot-long with a lot of meat, she would need the protein, and ate half of it before storing the rest and the bag of chips with her electronics and started biking again. She had started later than she had initially planned when she outlined the Escape, and that meant it was almost midnight before she found the motel she was looking for. She tried to go in but the door was locked, a sign saying check-in time had ended hours ago.

Katie moaned and rubbed her sweaty face, still breathing hard and not knowing what to do. She had assumed hotels would check in customers whenever, she hadn't even thought to research something like that.

Cursing, she kicked the door and pulled out her phone, trying to find somewhere else to sleep that would take in clients at this hour. Most of them didn't, and those that were still open Katie had already struck from her list of possibles because their online reputations made the idea of someone as young as her being in five miles of the place a distinctly _bad_ idea. She ate the rest of her sandwich – she was ravenous – and downed her third bottle of water. She had been biking for six hours, and was roughly halfway to Galaxy Garrison. She thought of just pushing through the night and biking the last six hours, but she knew that if she did she would pass out wherever she stopped, and without a place to sleep she wasn't about to leave herself that vulnerable. She had to think about this logically.

The best option would be a shelter, those were open 24/7, but they were probably notified to keep an eye out for her, and Katie wasn't yet sure she passed as a boy yet. She did a few quick searches – she didn't want to be on the internet too long even with a disposable phone – but the nearest homeless shelter was still another hour away. There was a shelter fifteen minutes away for battered women, and Katie stared at that the longest but... she wasn't battered. Her mother had slapped her all of twice in her life, and _words_ had very little value except to hurt people, and it wasn't like anyone would believe fourteen year old Katie or even fifteen year old Pidge Gunderson. She wasn't in crisis, she was just on a Mission to find her family. She knew exactly where to go and what to do, she just needed to get through the next couple of... weeks... until the next term started.

Katie did consider, briefly, going back. Having nowhere to sleep was scary, and options were limited, and Katie didn't know yet what to do, but she knew that she would rather have nowhere to sleep than go crawling back to her mother. She wouldn't emotionally survive that and she wasn't sure she would work up the nerve after an explosion that bad.

Frowning, Katie looked around. Her legs were _burning_ from the exertion and she knew from experience prior that she would be sore all over tomorrow, but for now she needed a safe place to sleep. Her eyes trailed up. Nobody would be on a roof...

But were there fire escapes anywhere?

Katie eventually found an alley with a fire escape. She learned the cruel reality of being _short_ , and had to stand on her bike in order to reach the ladder and prayed her weight was enough counterbalance. It was, and she grabbed everything off her bike and lugged it up to the roof. She couldn't bring her bike back up, and there was nowhere to lock it to, and Katie took a deep breath and gambled that it would still be there when she woke up.

On the roof, above all the street lights, she looked up to the stars, barely visible for the light pollution, and silently told Matt and Dad that she was coming.

She laid out her luggage bag like a sleeping blanket and pulled out one of her sweatshirts. Her last task was to pull out her phone and send a pre-written email to her Mom, explaining how to buy food and what items would be needed for the next week, as well as instructions on how to cook all the meals and where to find the house cleaning stuff. She laid back in her sweatshirt, and was asleep in minutes.

* * *

It was midmorning when she woke up, and everything _ached_.Her legs could barely move and her back and shoulders hurt for all the weight she had been carrying for so long. Moaning, she rolled over to fumble for her phone on the nightstand and instead hit gravel. Blinking, she opened her eyes and didn't find galaxy posters or lists of famous women in science, but instead saw the gravel asphalt mix of a roof, and the memory of yesterday resonated over her.

For a split second she felt… but it was gone too quickly to name as she sat up and focused on getting to work. She had another six hours to bike, assuming she still had her bike, breakfast to buy, and a place to stay for the next night. All of her searches had been dependent on when she would get up, when she would leave, and Katie hadn't realized that life wouldn't let her plan that deep. She should have been up and gone two hours ago. Her stomach rumbled, not satisfied with the half sandwich and chips for supper, and she rubbed at her face, recollecting all of her things (and thank god she had thought to bring her pillow) and rearranging them so they could fit in her backpack, even her laptop and satellite dish. It put more weight on her shoulders, but it was better than carrying so many bags. It took some clever folding and full use of all the side pockets - the backpack bulged a little but she could now ditch the luggage bag and look like a more normal teenager.

After that she climbed down to street level. Her bike was still there, her gamble had worked.

She breathed a sigh of relief, and walked it up the street to a coffee place. She bought four bottles of water and an over priced cinnamon roll, hoping the sugar would wake her up. Sitting at a tiny table she stretched her calves and feet, trying to limber them up for the next grueling part of her journey. The local news was on, and no sign of an amber alert. Did Mom not notice she was missing? Or was she simply waiting for Katie to come home?

Katie pulled out her phone and saw no less than eight emails from her mother. She read all of them, even the ones that insulted her and belittled her, and the cinnamon roll sat heavily in her stomach.

… _I can only take responsibility for three things: pulling you into Dad and my arguments, because the false judgements he would make was putting me into despair. He gave me no reason for living, none, and he could be that bad! He falsely judge his mother, too! He caused me to be desperate and for that I am sorry!..._

… _This despair made me feel so worthless, and such a failure and I so needed a way out. Yes, I felt guilty going to you and Matty for I knew I shouldn't do it and when Dad pushed me to the brink, anyone would have become suicidal, anyone! At the same time the both of you hearing that was awful for you and for that I am sorry even though it was your father who drove me to it!..._

… _After Dad and Matty died there were many times I wanted to put him in a good light because he did have good qualities. Well, I failed every time because all my resentments came to the surface. Many times afterwards I would mentally kick myself for that is not what I wanted to do!..._

… _But your world is so filled with distortions and non truths and situations lumped together, making me out to be the worst child abuser! If you actually cared and took the time to think about it YOU are the one who is abusing ME!..._

 _Your father's false judgements did a number on me, and your false judgements are doing a number on me too and that is when you see me react!..._

… _You have never been to despair, because if you had you most certainly would understand what I was dealing with and shown compassion and understanding..._

… _You have become so toxic since your father and Matty died. You are filled with hatred and false judgements and I've become the victim of you!..._

… _You just pacified me and judged me falsely, too!..._

… _There were times I thought of leaving your father but things would have been far worse for you, and me, too. Dad's biggest flaw was that he was judgmental. Many, many times he threw me into despair, to the depths of suicide but what stopped me was both of you. You were my reasons to go on. Believe me, he did have me wishing I died and he always had the attitude he was always right and he was narcissistic and he wouldn't share with me. I could go on and on about why Dad was the problem, the instigator, not me but you have already judged me as the culprit so what is the use!..._

… _In many ways I was too soft on the both of you!..._

… _You are making me out to be this abuser! I NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER said I should have beaten you as children! NEVER! That is NOT TRUE! That is a complete and total over reaction and fabrication!..._

… _I DID NOT DESERVE THIS..._

… _You didn't even think to let me know how to cook supper or where to find things at the market!..._

… _And I need my toenails cut, you know how I can't reach them!..._

Katie felt sick to her stomach but managed to snort when she saw that line, and it was enough to pull out of reading the train wreck of emails her mother wrote. She went to the bathroom, was sick, and drank her first bottle of water in the hopes that her stomach wouldn't be mad for losing its nutrients for the next several hours.

Taking a deep breath, she began the next leg of her journey.

* * *

She didn't get nearly as far as she had planned, her legs barely moved and she was well below her average biking speed. Even after the ache burned away and she could pump her pedals she didn't make her second checkpoint at noon like she had planned, but closer to two o'clock. That was a late lunch and she knew she would have to spend more money to replenish her nutrients. She was already through two of her water bottles, she bought two more and had a super-sized takeout meal. The taste was _awful_ but her stomach thanked her anyway. She gave herself an hour break, stretching her legs and redoing her french braid and tucking it under her hat. Her phone told her that an amber alert still hadn't been raised, but Katie knew she was on borrowed time at this point. She was still a minor and her mother was completely detached from reality.

She planned her afternoon more carefully, looking at the list of motels she had chosen and doing some mental math based on how (not) fast she was traveling. If she pushed she could make it to the Garrison, but that ran the risk of not finding a place to sleep and she didn't want to go through that again.

By that night her phone was buzzing an amber alert every half hour, and Katie knew her time was up. The description was in her old clothes and bike, and Katie was glad she had changed. She took a deep breath and knew that Katie had to disappear completely. She wasn't Katie anymore, she was Pidge. Pidge. Pidge. Pidge…

 _Pidge_ walked into the motel she had chosen and said she - he - wanted a room for the night. He said he would pay in cash, and the doorman gave a small, slow, blink, saying they only took check or credit card. Damn.

Pidge went to the next motel on his list, and they did take the cash, and Pidge locked the door and moved the one nightstand over to the door to be safe. She slept in a real bed with her own pillow, and for a moment she could pretend she was back in her room, the closest thing she had to a safe space, and the scent of her pillowcase lulled her to sleep.

Katie, Pidge, got up earlier this time, and knew she - he - only had an hour's bike this time before he was at the town that "housed" Galaxy Garrison. The base itself was a good ten miles away from the town, but after everything Pidge had done that would be a light trip compared to the grueling dozens of miles he'd put in just to get there. He rode into town and saw the amber alert still active, not only on his phone but also on the local news. Everywhere he looked her picture was plastered on a screen, and he kept his head way, way down when he saw a law-enforcement officer or a black-and-white drive by. He pulled out a map and looked for parks, malls, places kids his age would normally hang out during summer vacation, somewhere to blend in.

He walked the shopping district up and down, explored the stores once his bike was firmly locked up and very carefully bought a school uniform - not cheap, given how little money he had, but utterly necessary. He got used to walking into male stalls and Katie got eyefuls of things she wasn't used to seeing at the unstalled… toilets. She shook it off as much as she could, knowing she couldn't let her facade break, and acted as naturally as Pidge Gunderson, a boy all his life, would.

Pidge got very good at keeping his head down, not looking up was something Katie had done all the time at home, so there wasn't much transition, but it was _very_ weird looking people in the eye when he talked to them. Even something as innocuous as a cashier caused her a little bit of fear, of _what if they recognize me_ , but he was also absurdly good at not letting it show, and as the day waned he thought there might be a sliver of hope.

Pidge walked into his motel and balked to realize the internet wasn't accurate with the rates. If he had liquidated his full account it wouldn't have been a problem, but after Mom had pulled from it she knew she would be out of money at least a week before the next semester actually started. She pulled out her phone, but the other establishments she had chosen for the town closest to the garrison were even more expensive. She grit her teeth and made the reservation online, signing all the digital documents on her laptop where she could fake the e-signatures with some programs she had written.

Pidge went in and asked if his dad had made a reservation, his meeting was running late and Pidge needed to pick up the key and start unpacking.

They wouldn't let her in without the father.

Pidge was cursing up a storm as she left, dragging her bike along and trying to figure out what to do next. The shadows were getting pretty long, sun still set late at night but now she had to think a little faster. Katie was about to pull out her phone before the streetlights came on, as well as the neon signs of the businesses on the street. Red outlines caught her vision, and she realized there was another motel, literally next door, to the one she was standing in front of.

She took a breath and entered. They took her money for a three week stay and didn't ask questions. She knew what that meant, and once she got her keycard and took the elevator to her room she dragged another nightstand to the door to block it. That would have to be her new nightly ritual to keep herself safe. She propped the bike up against the window as a deterrent/noise maker there, though the third floor was less inviting for rude entry. Moderately safe, she pulled apart her backpack, plugged in her laptop, connected to the motel wifi, and immediately hacked the security to make sure there were no cameras in her room. There was only one, and she fed it a harmless loop to give her a modicum of privacy.

After that was a shower to wash off two days of sweat, grime, and roof gravel with complimentary hand soap and the one bottle of shampoo she thought to bring. She put her pillow on the bed, set up her satellite, and pointed it out the window and put on her headphones. The curtains were drawn for her privacy, but she listened to the white noise loop, the repetition, and thought of her family lost on space.

* * *

The thought of food and an intense rumble of the stomach dragged Katie... Pidge... out of bed. The foreign room startled her at first, it wasn't the color and lines she expected; the light came from a different place, and she was confused when she couldn't see her brother's empty bed. She sat up and rubbed at her eyes before everything snapped into place, and she moaned into her hands. Pidge pulled on a grey pair of cutoffs and a green and white shirt – formerly her brother's.

For the first week Pidge stayed in his room. He wandered the internet, sniffing around the garrison's servers, careful to leave no trail. If he wasn't doing that he was sneaking up to the roof to point his tiny satellite dish up to space, angling to where Kerberos was and picking up the repeating pattern. Pidge wasn't completely safe, one window was dedicated to the news feed of her amber alert, but runaways didn't garner much news attention after the first few days, and so long as she kept her head down she should be fine. She didn't talk to the people at the front desk, only left to get a few boxes of cereal and peanut butter crackers, something to keep her fed that was cheap and could be bought in bulk. The second week Pidge forced himself out to the local hangouts, sitting with his laptop and watching skateboarders and basketball games while he poked at his dish. With nothing to do but wait for the term to start, all of his mental energy was dedicated to the problem now, and Pidge was fairly sure the loop wasn't a bug in the software, and that made him wonder how to decode it.

The third week was a little harder. Pidge was running out of money and she knew her stay was going to be up. She couldn't exactly stop eating, and even if she did that didn't add more than two days to her stay. Frowning, she fretted over what to do. She took up a few odd jobs in the shopping district, errands mostly to make even a couple of extra bucks and cursed herself that she hadn't thought of that sooner. She went to bed at night stressing over the money and then dreaming about her family and waking up sick to her stomach.

The fourth week the stay at the hotel was out, and she still had four days before the start of term.

It was because she was ticking down the days obsessively that she realized she had a boon. Pidge was staring at the road leading to Galaxy Garrison trying to figure out what to do when she realized there was a small pulse of traffic going down the road leading to it. Frowning and more focused now, Pidge started tracking and saw that yes, a few cars were going to the garrison.

… Why?

Pidge biked the ten miles to the complex, done in no time and pulled up at the main gate, where a pickup truck was, talking to the person manning it.

"Woohoo! I'm in! I'm so totally in! Look out Garrison – you now have Lance McLain to deal with! Watch as I conquer everybody here!"

Pidge stared flatly at the flailing arms and jumping body attached to the voice, a teenager in the back of the pickup, unable to contain his excitement.

Did... did the garrison take students in early?

Pidge pulled out her phone and dug through the website and... yes. It did take students up to a week before opening ceremonies, with rolling orientation classes and free meals. Pidge's mouth _watered_.

She – he – continued biking down and asked what he needed for check in. He showed the student ID that Pidge had faked and his acceptance letter, and he just... walked on campus.

Pidge was beside herself, walking his bike through the complex as another car drove by and a line of families gathered by the main entrance to the school. One super-large guy in yellow was in a tearful embrace with his parents and the guy from the pickup was running around shrieking like a crazy person. Pidge ignored them and instead quietly walked to the line that was forming at a table set out by the doors. Pidge showed his ID again and was asked where his parents were.

"Mom's dead," she answered flatly. "Dad's in the hopsital."

There was a noise of sympathy and Pidge signed all the forms herself before being given a keycard with a room number. Already familiar with this in motels, Pidge made her way inside and followed the map she was given. No one else was in her room, and Pidge locked and blocked the door while she took another shower and put on her boy's uniform. She brushed out her hair and put on Matt's glasses, looking at herself in the mirror.

"... First day of 'school,' " she muttered to herself.

It took more effort than she realized to cut her hair, it had been long her entire life and to willingly have it so short... she had forgotten now naturally curly her hair could be when it wasn't pulled down by it's own weight, and everything slowly started to fluff out as her hair dried, creating a thick mass of honey brown... _foof_ that looked ridiculous. But it was short, and Pidge would have to get used to it. It wasn't like she was Katie anymore.

Hair cut, she unblocked the door and pulled out her laptop, powering it down and plugging it in before deliberately leaving behind the things that she had religiously guarded for almost a month. Her dorm was her home now, she had to make herself feel safe enough to leave it there.

… She made it three feet before she grabbed her laptop and satellite.

Then she went to the spot on the roof Matt had told her about.

And she listened to the stars.

* * *

From Galaxy Garrison, Pidge learned many things:

Academics were nowhere _near_ as hard as Matt made it out to be.

Physical fitness was _infinitely worse_ than Matt made it out to be.

Their servers were much harder to crack into when thinking about getting caught.

And Pidge was surrounded by _idiots_.

Pidge made a perfunctory effort at doing the work as a show for his dorm mates, but the minute lights were out he was up on the roof studying the signal because he hadn't come here to learn, he'd come here to escape her mother and find her family. The signal was the next best thing, because it was repeating: if it was repeating then it was man made, if it was man made it could be reverse engineered, and if it was reverse engineered then Pidge might learn something about her family. Schoolwork, no matter how easy, was the bottom of the priority list.

Her world _rocked_ when she realized the signal wasn't _man_ made. She spent a week staring dazedly in class, trying to wrap her mind around the fact that she had, by complete accident, performed her father's lifelong dream: discovering life in space. She completely bombed two tests in a row and was placed on a flight team for simulation as punishment.

And if the student body as a whole wasn't composed of _idiots_ , the two she had been stuck with were the most _idiot of idiots_ she had come across. The big guy, Hunk, was nice enough and really knew his hardware, but flight was the furthest thing from his capability, and Lance was this cocky arrogant _showboat_ , all bluster and no substance, and Pidge was left trying to do all the work, except he was so damn _short_ he couldn't reach everything he needed to. Pidge was well trained to never confront something like this head on, but without the ever looming fear of a witch subfunction all the color commentary that usually ran through the brain started to run through the mouth.

Everything ended in a crash because Lance couldn't pilot for _crap_ and Hunk ended up doing more harm than good and Pidge tried so hard to compensate but just couldn't do everything. Simulations to the Mars station or the fifty year old exploration of Saturn's rings were disasters, and Pidge didn't overly care because he was too busy trying to figure out how to get to Iverson's office in student uniform and put a USB transmitter on his computer. Maybe being terrible was actually a good thing...? Didn't Matt get pulled into talking to Shirogane because he had broken rules?

And then there was a simulation of Kerberos.

And then the two idiots found Pidge on the roof.

And there was a crash.

And there was Captain Shirogane.

And there was... Voltron.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** ... The difference between Pidge's escape and ours comes mostly from age. We were adults when we finally left, and were homeless in a hotel for nine days before we found a place to live. Pidge, being significantly younger and without a job, had to be monstrously more careful. But the actual arc: forgetting prescriptions, being called selfish, seeing the day and asking if it was worth it, and leaving the house, that is true and actually _sanitized_ compared to what happened to us. We were caught trying to leave. It went... very badly.

But the good news is that Pidge is away from the abuse, and now she has to come to terms with what happened to her and put in in perspective - not an easy feat by any stretch of the imagination, but there's a fundamental relief in not being at the source of pain that can't really be described in words. As stressful as it was fining a place to live, everything was easier because we weren't there for the emotional blow up and tirade and threats. For the first time our stress was normal for the situation, not exacerbated by someone else.

Also, to the person who felt cheap for sharing their pain: don't feel cheap. Don't compare your pain to ours, because yours is just a valid, just as real, and sometimes saying it out loud is the hardest thing to do, but now that it's been done it can be done again. And again, until you find the help you need.

Next chapter: The team has varying reactions to Pidge explaining her life, because normal people don't understand that mothers can and do hurt their children.


	4. Loss of Solitude

**Part Four: Loss of Solitude**

Pidge was so far removed from her old life she would wake up sometimes and wonder what it was like to be terrified of her mother. She went from family to Mom to homeless to student with an agenda to up in _space_ in less than a year and sometimes she couldn't quite tell which life changing event her emotions were trying to sort through at any given time. The unceasing lists of projects distracted her but sometimes she would have a day where she was in such a _mood_ , anxious or angry at something she couldn't put just one name to, or she would be so lethargic that it would take her hours to write one program, or have Hunk try to feed her special things because he picked up on stuff.

Bonding with the team was hard.

Like, really, _really_ hard.

Lance was so over the top it was nearly impossible to take him seriously until he pulled an eleventh hour rescue while _half dead_ , Keith barely spoke and Hunk was nice enough, but so crippled by fear or _normal_ things that he was hard to take seriously. The one she related to best was... Shiro, and she didn't like thinking about why that was the case, why both of them had survived trauma, because that meant admitting her life was traumatizing, and even after the Escape she couldn't quite reconcile being yelled at equivocating to _fighting in a colosseum to stay alive._

It was also uncomfortable because Shiro knew who she was, knew her name and her gender, and Pidge, Katie, wasn't entirely sure what else he knew. Matt said in his messages that he had told Dad about the Plan, but did that mean he told Shiro, too? If he did, had Shiro believed him, or not? Pidge was afraid to bring any of it up, and so she didn't. If she found an excuse to be near him when she was having a bad day, he never said anything, and he already proved he wouldn't push when she didn't talk. And if he sought her out in the middle of the night when he had a nightmare, well, it was the least she could do.

But the one who figured it out first was Keith.

* * *

They were sitting together in the common room after training. Hunk was laid out on the couch moaning about how hard he worked while Keith leaned against a wall (presumably to hold it up, Pidge theorized) and Shiro was going over a data pad to adjust their next training session. Lance had had a good session, smug and sitting with his legs crossed, loose foot bobbing up and down and arms spread out along the back of the circular couch.

"That was an amazing session," he said in a blithe voice.

"You just say that because you lasted the longest," Hunk corrected.

"I did!" Lance replied, not even pretending to hide his pride. "Training really makes you feel closer to your teammates, really puts in perspective what you can and can't do."

There was a sidelong glance over to Keith that both Pidge and the Red Paladin ignored.

"Yep, really helps you get to know people. I'm in such a good mood I think we should do something nice and bondy!"

Hunk was beside himself. "You want _more_ training? But you hate it almost as much as me!"

Lance made a face. "I'm not talking about more _fighting_ ," he correct, "I mean more _bondy_ , like sharing ghost stories or having a game of truth or dare. If we got Allura here we could play spin the bottle and-"

"I vote against spin the bottle," Pidge said quickly.

"Seconded," said Shiro without even looking up from his work.

"Third-ed," said Hunk.

"Fourthed," said Keith.

"Motion vetoed, next motion," Hunk said, sitting up. "I dunno about ghost stories though. I mean we just had a haunted castle. Food _attacked_ me. I don't know if you can _get_ scarier than that. That's, like, my worst fear."

Lance was frowning. "Dude, that's, like, a _terrible_ worse fear," he said. "I mean, like, _lame_."

"I don't know," Shiro said, looking up from from his work with a faint smirk. "It's creative. A far cry better than most of us, I'd wager."

Everyone stared at him, blinking.

Lance recovered first. "A miracle!" he shouted, standing up and pumping his hands in the air. "He can make a joke! The great and mighty Shiro has _made a joke!_ "

Hunk chuckled. "Wow, I thought the only kind of humor I'd get would be from Lance and Pidge. Lance gets annoying and Pidge is way too cerebral!"

Pidge and Lance were both offended, but Pidge cut Lance off, "I am _not_ cerebral! I'm just surrounded by _idiots_!"

"Wow, and they call _me_ cocky and overconfident," Lance said, looking down on her. "Way to be a team player with that crack."

Pidge was bristling, she was irritated and she didn't know why, and the first two replies were too mean-spirited. "I can't help being smart!" she said defensively.

"You could if you ever acted like a normal girl," Lance said.

"What does it matter if I'm a girl?"

"A normal _kid_ then, jeez. Normal kids don't do calculus for fun; normal kids don't find robotics sexy, normal kids actually act like _kids_."

"Well _excuse me_ for not being _normal!_ " Pidge grunted, standing up and grabbing her laptop. "Next time you want me to run a diagnostic on Blue, find somebody who's _normal_!"

"Pidge!"

Katie ignored Shiro's call, stomped out of the common room and down the hall. It wasn't a big deal – intellectually she knew it wasn't a big deal, just Lance being Lance – but he made it sound like not being normal was a bad thing, and Pidge was so far past normal she had no measuring stick to even judge the veracity of his words. It scraped over her experiences, made her feel less than good about herself, and she was finally in a place where she _could_ feel good about herself, finally in a place where Hunk and Shiro and Allura freely and without any prompting told her how smart she was, she didn't have to say something to make them say it the way she had to make her mother say she loved her. It had taken everything that was in her to let everyone help her find her family, she was so used to doing it all herself that it had _taken_ Lance almost dying and Shiro sacrificing himself for her to realize that these people around her might actually be... friends.

Friendship was a foreign word to Pidge. She never had any growing up because connecting to people who didn't have a mom like hers was hard, the only person who understood was Matt, and they were so close Pidge had no way to bridge being that close to him with being that close to someone else. People would have to know about her mother, and believe her about her mother. They... would have to _understand_ her, and Katie was so well trained to keep her mouth closed about the things people needed to most know about that she never felt the connection. Academically she knew they all considered her a friend, and she liked them well enough, but she didn't feel the connection she thought people were supposed to feel. Where was the _boke_ \- the shojo bubbles - and flower petals and strong feelings? The declarations of friendship and fist bumps and all the stuff she would see in cartoons and comics? Where were the _feelings_ that came with friendship, what did they look like?

Pidge had no idea.

And Lance pointing out how out of depth she was because she was _abnormal_ did _not_ help.

Once she was in Green's bay she hooked her laptop up to her latest project and started taking readings. She needed to distract herself, and escapism looked a lot like debugging alien technology. She stayed there for a long time, lost in zeros and ones, working in a world that was understandable, that could make sense. Keith came in to bring her to dinner, and she was almost back together. She didn't quite smile, but she didn't bring it up, and as her short stature passed under him she completely missed the look he was giving her as she padded down to the galley.

Shiro had his arms crossed and gave Lance a very deliberate look the minute Pidge arrived.

Lance, for his part, didn't even resist. "Hey," he said softly. "Sorry about earlier. About saying you weren't normal."

Pidge did what she was trained to do, defuse and deflect. "It's fine," she said. "You're probably right that I'm abnormal."

"Jeez, Pidge, I didn't mean it _that_ way."

"No, it's okay," she reassured. "It's nothing. Don't worry about it."

The strategy that worked on her mother for years did not – completely – work on the other Paladins. Shiro and Hunk exchanged worried looks and Keith kept staring at her all through dinner, but Pidge kept her head down and sat as still as possible, passive and invisible, until she was done eating and went back to work.

Keith had followed her, however, and no sooner had she sat down that he entered her field of view. She looked up, and for a long second they both looked at each other. Pidge didn't want to talk, and she knew Keith wasn't great at starting conversations, and the stalemate lasted for a while before Keith pursed his lips.

"After you left," he said, before shaking his head and clarifying. "The first time. After training. Shiro talked to them. About acting normal and what that did and didn't mean. Then he made all of us share our fears to prove a point."

Pidge looked over the rim of her glasses. "Your fears?" she asked, voice flat.

Keith shook his head. "It made sense at the time, you had to have been there," he said shifting his weight. The guy was a _terrible_ story teller. "Made us all sit down with the brain-readers, made them realize that normal is relative. Lance complained you weren't there."

"Of course he did," Pidge said, turning back to her computer.

"I told Shiro not to get you."

That made her stop. "... What?"

"I didn't think you wanted to share your worst fear," he said. "Something that big is very private."

Careful, careful, this was probably nothing... this was probably _nothing_... don't jump to conclusions just play it very cool and _very neutral_.

Pidge adjusted her glasses, kept her face blank. "What would you know about my worst fear?" she asked.

"Because I've seen you before. At the orphanage."

That told Pidge more about the Red Paladin than her entire time with him to this point; a hundred questions fired along her neurons but the thing that came out of her mouth was, "I've never been to an orphanage."

"But I've seen you there. The way you talk, the way you distract yourself with projects, the way you hold yourself still when you think someone's mad at you, the fact that you mention your dad and brother over and over but never once talk about your mom."

Katie stiffened.

"I read all about the Kerberos mission," Keith said, "After the news. After Shiro was gone. I knew that the Holts were survived by a wife and daughter. Almost visited you, after I dropped out. I was... lost."

Pidge, Katie, hummed, holding very still. The silence drew out, Green towering over them and the lights making the place too bright for a conversation like this.

"For a long time I thought your Mom was just... gone. Like..." Keith's face drifted off to something, a look Katie saw on herself many times after the news of the crash, but before she could do more than recognize it Keith shook himself out of it. "But then I remembered you were a Holt. That your Mom was alive. Like I said. I saw this at the orphanage." He looked at her, his eyes almost blue in this light, face so serious and so heavy and so _knowing_. "How bad was it?"

And, against her will, she answered: "I wasn't beaten, if that's what you're asking."

Keith nodded. "That's worse."

"... What?"

"No scars, no bruises, no way to prove it really happened. But it did."

Katie was passed knowing what to do, just stared at him. The silence drew out again, and Pidge was at a loss, had never met someone who understood. Not like Mr. Benegyani. The insides of her fingers pulsed, remembering Mom's first suicide attempt with the knife. Was she still alive now, or had she finally killed herself? Should Katie feel guilty for it? Was she supposed to think and worry about her mom? She didn't, did that make her a bad daughter? What was she supposed to do when this was all over – go back to that house...? The thought caused her stress, and she curled her shoulders forward, unconsciously rocking back and forth.

Keith telling her it did happen brought it all up, all the muddled confusion and the ambivalent feelings and the fear of all the unknowns and the memories of the Escape and being homeless for so long. Her insides were shaking again, and when a hand touched her back she nearly jumped out of her skin, spinning around and seeing Keith there, a look on his face that said... everything. Loner or not there were some things he did very well, and his look spoke volumes. Katie put her head in her hands and cried, and Keith held his hand to her back, letting her pour all her emotion out.

* * *

Keith didn't say a word after that, just let her be. Pidge felt weirdly better that someone in the castle knew some of what was going on, but she was so emotionally spent that she wasn't sure if there should be more or not. She did know herself to know that poor Keith was going to be on the receiving end of a verbal dump of what her entire life had been like, like with Mr. Benegyani, but for now she was so numb it wasn't a priority.

Hunk made her favorite foods, because he was nice like that, and Pidge helped him with his coding as he tried to reverse engineer the shapeshifting nature of bayards as a thank-you. Shiro deliberately paired Lance with Pidge, which she might have thought was some kind of punishment save the fact that Lance kept looking at her funny, and giving her wide openings in sparring combat that she took full advantage of. When he landed on his rear for the third time in a row he finally managed to look indignant.

"Show some gratitude why don't you!"

"Oh," Pidge said, sarcasm heavy in her voice. "I should be grateful you fight like I'm a fragile little girl? _Thank you so much,_ Master Lance, for being so forward thinking about my gender and how it pertains to how I fight."

"You think I'm doing this because you're a _girl_? Okay, that's it, being nice to you is off the table!"

Which was kind of what Pidge wanted in the first place. Not for Lance to be mean, per se, but for him to stop treating her like she was going to break. She had survived _her freakin' mother_ , a good hit in the controlled environment of a sparring session was nothing. Feeling bad about saying she wasn't normal was one thing, feeling bad enough to try and shelter her was something else entirely - that was _pity_ , and Katie knew damn well how little pity helped _anyone_. The spar was much better balanced after that, and Shiro called an end to it once everyone had worked up a good sweat, ending with a four-on-one fight in which Shiro (expectedly) wiped the floor with all of them.

"Okay," he said, barely winded. "I've seen a lot of improvement today, especially once our heads were in the game. Tonight I want you all to think about the best and worst part of your respective fights, and what they say about you as a person. We'll share tomorrow after morning meditation."

"Homework?" Hunk and Lance said in joint indignation. "Since when did forming Voltron require _homework_?"

"Dismissed," Shiro said, and the pair were still moaning as they made their way to the showers. Pidge popped out her contacts and put on her glasses, adjusting the frames before turning to follow, but a large hand placed itself on her shoulder. Shiro was looking at her. "A word," he said softly.

Pidge nodded, a little unsure what he needed and a little afraid when she listed out the possibilities.

They walked to the other end of the training ring, away from Keith who was watching them with narrow eyes before going to the showers.

"Look," Shiro said gently, "I've been giving you space on this, because I know it's not easy to talk about and I didn't want to assume that you didn't already have someone." He paused, took a breath. Wait, was he nervous? "But Keith's already figured it out and it's a matter of time before the others do. Do you want to tell them about your mother on your own?"

… He knew. Katie sighed. "So they did talk about Mom," she said.

Shiro's smile was soft. "I know it's private, and some things will always be hard to talk about, even for me." Pidge winced, knowing how much effort it was sometimes for Shiro to admit when he had a dream or describe a memory, how it felt to watch him just disappear inside his own mind like her mother did, how it felt to just sit next to him and hope he came back - so starkly different to the relief of seeing Mom gone for a time.

"It wasn't that bad," she said, looking down at her hands. "Like, I wasn't beaten, my life wasn't on the line, so it doesn't really compare. You _have_ to talk about it. For you, it's about staying healthy. I'm okay. I'm… I'm fine."

Arms, strong, warm arms wrapped around her shoulders; she could feel it even through the Paladin armor, and her face was pressed against the cool material of Shiro's breastplate. Everything about it, context to texture, was different, but it felt exactly like one of Dad's hugs, when Katie or Matt were trying to help him deal with Mom. A large hand whirred as it cupped the back of her head, and for a split second Katie wasn't sure who was hugging her. She hummed, pressing her forehead against the cool metal. She stayed in that embrace for a long time, Pidge wrapping her small arms around his waist.

"Nobody would be fine after going through something like that," Shiro said softly. "No one survives something like that without coming out scarred, and ignoring those scars isn't going to make them go away. It doesn't have to be me, but you should talk to _someone_. And you should let the others know what you've been through, so they can help you just like they're helping me."

"... Did you believe them?" she asked, her voice small.

The answer was a very long time in coming.

"Not at first," Shiro admitted. "Not like Keith did." He was still rubbing the back of her head, still encircling her with warmth, but Pidge pulled back slightly, wanted to see his face as he explained. Shiro gestured, and the pair sat down on the floor, Shiro worrying his mechanical palm. "I don't know if you remember this, but I met all of you at graduation. Sam - your father - he was so proud to see me graduate, and he said he didn't always bring his family to see a graduation. You were pretty young, and Matt was smack in the middle of middle school. Sam introduced you, and your mother was so cordial and charming."

"I remember that," Pidge said. "It took everything from Dad to convince her to go. She never liked going to graduations. It was always inconvenient. She liked him being space when that happened, so we had the excuse to skip going. The Hermit subfunction. "She made him regret it as soon as we left."

Shiro's eyes lowered, sadness spreading across his features. "I didn't know that."

Pidge had nothing to add.

"First impressions are misleading. Your mother made me think she was a normal person. After graduation, once we were all on the space station getting ready for Kerberos, though, then I learned. Your father and brother were having a fight, Matt had a plan on moving out of the house and taking you with him, and Sam hadn't known about it. I walked right in, didn't realize what the fight was about until the doors slid open and they both turned to stare at me. Matt asked, and I quote, 'So, Shiro, if you live with someone who's abusive what's the natural thing to do?' "

Katie made a sudden choking noise, quickly covering her mouth because it sounded _just like_ Matt after Garrison: to say things so flippantly and not care if Mom heard - not care if _people_ heard.

"We had the entire ride together. I tried to give them privacy but Matt was happy to pull me in, said having an objective part would help. He told Sam and I what life was like in the house. It took a while, but the picture did sink in. Sam never refuted it and hearing the things your mother said… I couldn't understand why the family was even still together. Sam had to explain that emotions are complicated, messy things, and that objectively breaking apart might be the right thing to do, but that it's hard to see after so many years of manipulation and conditioning."

A natural pause drew out, Shiro sitting on the floor, worrying his hand; Pidge sitting across from him, watching someone who was so composed and so broken at the same time show something as normal as anxiety over talking about a sensitive topic. Pidge hadn't realized how talkative her brother had become, but in a way she was glad that he had found the strength to reach out, to share his story even with people who didn't understand, to be patient enough to make them understand. If Shiro could come around, others might to. It was nice to know that people could be convinced.

"I'll be honest," he said, "All things considered, I was surprised she let you sneak into Galaxy Garrison at all."

Pidge winced, popping her glasses up enough to rub her nose. "She… might not have had a say in it," she said carefully.

Shiro blinked, but his face didn't change to judgement or prediction, did not take a warning tone. He simply asked, "Why?"

"Uhm," she said, her normal articulation suddenly gone. She looked down at her hands, something burning and bubbling up. "I may have… have run away."

"Oh, Katie."

She was hugged again, more awkwardly because of the space between them, a one-armed embrace with Shiro tilting head head down into hers. The warmth was still omnipresent, though, and the strength around her shoulders made something inside of her relax.

"Tell me what happened."

And she did. She explained about the prescriptions, the crystallizing moment of knowing how bad the day was going to be and asking if it was worth it. The plan and the luggage and the pillow she brought with her. Sleeping on a roof and sleeping in a motel with the door blocked for safety. Living off of peanut butter crackers and cereal to make her money last. Reverse engineering the Galra signal talking about Voltron. All the while the warm embrace tightened, until a second arm joined and squeezed with all the strength and softness of a dream.

"You were so brave to do that."

"Not really," she admitted, too strung out and numb and _so tired_ to put much effort in the rebuff. "Just too stubborn to go back. Too desperate to find Dad and Matt."

"No," Shiro said softly, exhaling into her hair. "Don't ever diminish something like that, don't write it off. Not a lot of people can leave like that. It's so much easier to just stay where you are, in the stagnation, with the pain that you know instead of going out into the unknown. The routine takes over, no matter how repulsive, and you get used to the abuses and think leaving won't change anything. It takes everything to get out, to go where things might somehow be worse, to know failure might be with every step, but to push through it anyway in the hopes of getting somewhere better." He wasn't talking about Katie's Escape anymore, Pidge realized, he was talking about his own. She still couldn't see how the two were even remotely similar, but if Shiro conflated the two, and affirming one meant affirming the other, then...

Pidge bowed to the logic.

They silently agreed to shower and change, and Shiro gently guided her to the common room.

* * *

For three days Pidge found excuses and reasons to talk to Keith and Shiro. She'd never had someone outside of family to talk about... well, about family to, and the novelty made her want to share every lurid detail. Keith made it clear early that talking made him uncomfortable; he listened very well, but offering insight proved to be hard for him; he struggled to find the right words, and sometimes turned her to Shiro. Shiro, in turn, would sometimes bring Keith in to make some kind of point that Pidge didn't know about. The novelty made her want to talk about _everything_ , she rambled about every memory and frustration and thought she ever had. Shiro listened the same way her father did: patiently, and with a sad look on his face and sometimes a hug that would take all the pain away. It was... It was more than talking to people who knew, it was talking to people who _understood_ , who affirmed her right to feel the way she did, who didn't diminish her experience or try to twist it into being her fault. They didn't tell her she was wrong, or that she shouldn't feel like she did. They just listened, and it was heaven.

Monopolizing their time did bring consequences, however, because people noticed things like that.

Shiro wasn't there, if he was it might have gone differently. Lance and Hunk wandered into the common room where Pidge had been talking to Keith. She immediately stopped talking, not wanting to discuss her mother with those two yet. Hunk looked questioningly between the two, knowing something was up, but shrugged his shoulders and let it be. Lance, however, who bristled whenever Keith was involved, saw the sudden silence and somehow found a way to take it personally.

"What's the matter?" he asked in a grand voice. "Too overcome by my awesomeness that you're struck silent in awe?"

Pidge and Keith both made faces, opting to say nothing. Lance, of course, would not be deterred.

"Don't think I haven't noticed all your little side conversations," he said, hands in pockets and leaning in to Keith's personal space. "I want to know what's so secretive that you shut up every time I walk into the room."

"Lance, I really don't think it's our business." Hunk poked his fingers together.

"He's right," Keith said flatly. "It's not."

"Well, _I_ say it is! What's the big deal? Why keep it a secret?"

"Because it's personal," Pidge said, irritated this was even a conversation.

"Oh, _I_ know what this is about," Lance said, eyes snapping to her and leaning in again. "This is about the biggest fear thing Shiro made us all share. You weren't there for that, were you? Sharing it with _Keith_ and not us? Think he's so _special_?"

"More likely it's because you're so clueless," Keith muttered.

"I heard that! Don't think I'm not done with you!" Lance narrowed his gaze. "So what is your fear, Pidge? What makes you so scared you won't even share it with your team? What could you possibly be afraid of that's worse than being eaten by food?"

It was a split second decision: truth or lie, dither and die, and it wasn't that Pidge was against them knowing, she just wasn't ready yet – but an opportunity like this wouldn't come again unless it was constructed, and Katie was a lot of things, but she wasn't _her mother_. She wouldn't manipulate this conversation.

"... my mom..."

Lance held a hand to his ear. "I'm sorry, what was that?"

"My worst fear," Pidge repeated, looking down, "My worst fear is my mom."

A pause drew out, Lance and Hunk both blinking at the confession. Pidge didn't look up to see more, just waited for their judgement.

Keith saw her discomfort, uncrossed his legs, ready to get up if necessary. "Are you happy now? You got what you wanted."

Lance spun his attention around. "You actually expect me to believe that?" he said, indignant. "We're all afraid of our mom's; that's what mom's are for! It's like some universal truth or something – it's not a _worst_ fear it's an _every_ fear. Name one kid who wasn't afraid of their mom at some point! What were you really talking about?"

"Exactly that," Pidge said, adjusting her glasses and running her fingers over her keyboard. "We were talking about my worst fear: my mom. Keith and Shiro are helping me come to terms with it."

Hunk's face shifted, changing from passive deescalation to concern. "Wait, you're serious?" he asked, hands lowering. "Your mom is your worst fear?"

"Yes," Pidge said. "She was..." she pursed her lips, still getting used to saying it out loud. "She was abusive. My worst fear is going back to her."

"Oh, man," Hunk said. "That must be, like, terrible."

"Pfft, every kid thinks their mom is the worst, me included. Doesn't make them abusive."

"Lance," Keith said, "Shut your big mouth."

"She used to say..." Pidge started. There was no backing out of this, now that it started. The more she said it out loud the more... easier wasn't the right word. She accepted it more. She acknowledged it more. "Uhm. She used to say that she should have beaten us as children. She said I was thoughtless, and irresponsible, and self-absorbed, and disrespectful. She broke down my door once to yell at me. She said Dad..."

A hand was on her shoulder, and she startled, hadn't realized she was looking down at her knuckles. Hunk had sat next to her, face full of compassion. "That must have been terrible to hear," he said. "I can't believe a mom would say something like that to her kid. My mom would never say things like that."

"She was... Matt and I did all the chores. Cooking, cleaning, yard work, everything. We oversaw repairmen coming to the house since I was eight. We got dragged into their fights, had to take Mom's side and explain to Dad why she was right. If either of us said or did something wrong, she would yell at us."

"Pidge," Lance said, voice soft. She looked up so see him watching her. He put a hand on her other shoulder. "Any parent is gonna yell when you get in trouble."

He didn't understand. She shook her head. "No. Not like that. You don't get it."

"Hey," Lance said. "We all get mad sometimes."

"Lance," Keith said in warning. "You need to back off."

Hunk was glancing back and forth between the Red and Blue Paladins. "It's true we all get mad," he said, trying to placate both sides. Pidge was getting more and more irritated. Why did she have to explain? Why didn't they believe her? Why were they trying to minimize what happened to her, make it normal? She shook her head.

"Not that kind of mad," she insisted. "Not the kind of mad where she could be heard in every corner of the house. Not the kind of mad where she's swearing at you."

Lance was watching her intently, his face was soft, and his voice was gentle. "My mom would yell and curse, too, if I didn't do chores. It's no big deal."

"It _is_ a big deal," Keith said, "You're not listening."

Lance whipped around to his rival. "Oh, and you do?"

"I listen enough to know she's not making this up."

"I'm not saying she is!" Lance said, straightening and facing his rival more fully. "I'm just trying to help her see it might not be as bad as she thought!"

 _Not as bad as she thought_...

Pidge snapped. She stood straight up, laptop sliding off her lap and falling to the floor. "What part of _breaking down the door_ do you not get?" she shouted. "What part of me being in charge of calling and overseeing work on the house _since I was eight_ do you not get? Did _your_ mom call your dad the Anti-Christ? Did _your_ mom ask why you were in calculus if you were so stupid? Did _your_ mom try to kill herself if her emotional needs weren't being met? _Did YOUR mom threaten to end her relationship with you?_ "

Lance and Keith both ground to a halt, Pidge's outburst taking them both by surprise. She was shaking, inside and out, body flooded with so much adrenaline she almost couldn't see straight. Couldn't think.

"Do you really think saying it's 'not as bad as I thought' really makes me feel better? Do you really think writing off shit like that as normal _helps_? Do you really like minimizing everything that happened to me? _Are you satisfied that your misplaced pity is hurting me?_ "

Her brain finally caught up to her words, and she realized how out of control she was, how like her damned _mother_ she was, and the minute Katie had that thought she lost all color. She sucked in a breath and took a step back, overwhelmed that she had just acted like her mother. What she as bad as her mother? Was she just as damaged, just as corrupted? Get out, get out, before things got even worse...! Katie covered her mouth and turned on her heel, power-walking out of the common room before she did any more damage. She thought she heard Keith say something but there was too much noise in her ears, she was too ashamed of what had just come out of her. She had never thought something like that was even _in_ her...

A hand touched her shoulder and she nearly jumped out of her skin, she spun around to see Hunk, slightly out of breath, had caught up to her.

"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "I don't know where that came from. I mean, I know where it came from but it never came out of me like that before, and I didn't mean to turn into her I just wanted him to understand what I went through and-"

"Okay, wait, stop," Hunk said. "I know you're about to go on a ten minute ramble that I have, like, a fifty-fifty shot of actually following, but I wanted to say something so just... just put that on pause, okay?"

Katie was still shaking off the adrenaline, all she could think to do was nod, numbly.

"So, look, I want to be honest here," Hunk said. "I really can't believe a mother would do, like, _any_ of the things you said back there."

Her heart sank.

"But I believe _you_ when you say it all actually happened."

… Hope.

"... Really?" she asked.

"Well, yeah," Hunk said, running a finger down his cheek. "I mean, I still can't picture any mother ever breaking down doors and calling you of all people stupid, but you say it happened, and you don't lie. Well, except for going by another name and pretending to be a boy, but you came out on that on your own and you've been straightforward on everything else – you even tell me when I'm going overboard or when I need to be more ambitious. Not a lot of people told me that at home, and I need to hear it sometimes. So, if you say your mom did all those things, then she did. And Pidge, like, seriously, I can't even comprehend what that would have been like."

He stopped scratching his cheek, out of words, looked down on her with worry and compassion and gentleness.

Pidge sighed, rubbing her eyes. "Some days _I_ don't believe it happened," she said finally. "Some days I wish I had someone else's life."

Hunk shrugged. "Well, you could technically say we're living a radically different life now, right?"

Pidge snorted, but a nod came out of her, and Hunk followed her to Green's bay to help with projects. Hunk never pushed, never asked, let her know he was there for her when she was ready – like he had been for a long time now, and Pidge realized that he might not be able to listen to the details of her life, but he would always be there to make her food to help distract her. It wasn't a perfect match, like Shiro and Keith, but it was... good enough. She looked up at him, stared for several seconds before saying,

"Hunk?"

"Yeah?"

"... Thanks."

* * *

Lance, however, she avoided like the plague. Every time he caught her eye in training he had this soft, sympathetic look on his face like he understood _anything_ and kept trying to motion her into conversation. She was decidedly disinclined to that, ducked out of sessions early and hid with Green to avoid the inevitable.

Shiro would have none of that, however, and finally stuck the two of them on the training deck, wrists bound together, and expected to navigate the invisible maze.

"Look," she said flatly, throwing a sour look up to the control room and hopefully at Shiro, "Let's just get this over with as fast as possible."

"Pidge," Lance said, "Look, I'm no trying to make you mad, okay?"

"Could have fooled me. Let's try going this way."

"No, seriously. I'm sorry," Lance said, keeping pace with his long stride. "You're upset, I get it. I'm just trying to help."

Pidge rolled her eyes, free hand up to her side to sense the heat of the electricity charging the invisible walls. "By telling me I'm wrong about my mom?"

" _No_ ," Lance said, insistent. "I'm just trying to give you, I don't know, perspective? When we got in trouble as kids my mom would yell and curse at us, shake her mixing spoon and give us a slap on the rump if we were small enough. We'd go to our room for an hour or two, and then she'd come up and we'd talk, and then do an extra shift of chores or something. I mean, I _hated_ it; I thought she was the meanest, evilest, dumbest mom _ever_ , but I came out just fine."

Pidge couldn't _quite_ bite back the snark. "If by 'fine' you mean insecure and desperate to prove yourself by trying to date Allura and be the center of attention at everything you do and pretend to be the best whether you are or not, then sure, Lance. You're 'fine.' "

Just to prove her point, Lance walked into one of the walls and jolted with the shock, darting back and yanking Pidge nearly off balance.

"I rest my case."

"You know, I'm _trying_ to make nice here," Lance said, rubbing his nose and still jittering slightly.

"Am I supposed to be grateful you're trying?" Pidge asked. "Or should I wait until you actually succeed?"

" _Quiznak!_ What do you want from me?"

"I want you to believe me," Pidge said, not missing a beat.

"Dude! I said it the other day! I _totally_ believe you! I just think you might not have the best perspective on it!"

Pidge face-palmed. She was calmer today compared to before, but that didn't mean listening to this _felt_ any better. "See," she said, "This is why I'm not talking to you," she said, taking a left when she felt her fingers cool. "You think I'm abnormal, you think I need my perspective fixed, you think I'm exaggerating the facts; you _say_ you believe me but you really don't."

"I never said any of that!"

"Yes, actually, you did," Pidge said, still calm more more heated. "You know who else thought my perspective needed to be fixed and thought I exaggerated fact or outright lied? My mom. You sound so much like her right now that I'm kind of having trouble telling the difference."

"Well, I'm glad you think I'm motherly."

Pidge was so suddenly _livid_ that for a split second she forgot where she was and walked into an invisible wall. After the shock had worn off and she had finished rubbing her nose she turned and tripped Lance into the wall she had just walked into. The Blue Paladin lurched to the floor, dragging Pidge with him.

"Have we not figured out yet that I have mother issues?" Pidge asked, her tone deceptively mild, poking him with her foot. "Have we not figured out that I'm literally, legitimately _triggered_ whenever you try and gloss over what happened to me?"

Lance groaned. "How many times do I have to repeat myself?" he asked, "I'm like a broken record or something: all I'm saying is that it might have been different than you remember!"

Pidge ran her hands through her hair, growling in frustration. "This is getting us nowhere!" she said, turning furious eyes to Lance. "You either accept what I'm telling you or you don't!"

"And _you_ have to accept I'm not the bad guy here!"

"Argh! You're not listening!"

"You first!"

"No, you!"

"You!"

"You!"

The absurdity of what was happening registered in Pidge's brain, and all the energy left her in a rush. Her head fell back in her hands, and she just... she just stopped, breathed, and took a long, long look at everything. She was okay with Hunk not understanding, but she was okay with it because even if he couldn't comprehend it he at least believed her. Lance didn't, and on paper that would have been fine, normal, except they were a zillion light years out in space on the other side of the universe and there were only three other humans and all five of them had to _somehow_ work together to form Voltron. Shiro's voice was suspiciously in the back of her head reminding her of this fact, and she had a moment of intense meta-cognition.

She had two choices: be okay with Lance not understanding her experiences, or not be okay with understanding her experiences.

The decision precipitated on what she thought of Lance: annoying ego-driven idiot or self-sacrificing natural hero, and that decision was made the day he shot a Galra in the back to give her a chance to break free and take back the castle. Lance was many things: annoying goofball, ardently lazy, deliberately obtuse, but underneath all the veneer and posturing and facade he clearly cared and wanted to do what was needed. Even now, he was trying (in his own way) to make her feel better. He was doing the exact opposite, but the fact that he was even trying was more than she ever got from her mother – that he even understood that she _had_ feelings that needed to be improved – was... nice.

And in that moment she decided that she could be okay with it. Not _okay_ , but okay.

"I give up," she said, suddenly exhausted. She rubbed her face and ran her hands through her hair again. "Fine, it was different. It was sunshine and flowers, Mom never said she wished I was never born, Mom never held her love as hostage, Mom never abused me for my entire life. Are you happy now?" She looked to Lance, still spread out on the floor, as he hoisted himself to a sitting position.

"I'm not saying it was perfect," Lance said, voice soft again, sympathetic. "I'm not even saying it wasn't unhealthy. But I just want you to look at it from a Mom's perspective."

"Lance," Pidge said dully, "I'm admitting loss to this argument. Don't push it further than that."

Lance was watching her, face open and a little... "It's sad," he said. "That's all. That a kid and their mom can misunderstand each other so badly."

"... That's because your mom was a real mom to you," Pidge said. "You... you're really lucky. That you had that." She pursed her lips, sighed heavily through her nose. "I'm glad you had that."

… And maybe a little envious.

The invisible walls hummed, entering the visible light spectrum and then dissolving.

" _Good work, you two,_ " Shiro said from up above. " _That's enough for today._ "

And inside, Katie sighed again.

He was right.

Today, this was enough.

 **End**

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** As of this writing, it has been seven months since our own Escape. It happened during April vacation, and when we went back to school our respective faculties learned... everything. The thing we learned very quickly was that not everyone understood. Part of it, true is that we did not talk about it to people outside the family, but also some people come from healthy, happy home lives and legitimately don't understand that it's even possible for a parent, let alone a mother, do the things Pidge's mother does. A friend we've talked to several times said, repeatedly, that he believed us but couldn't imagine our abuse, that who he met, was capable of the things we said. He means well, but it doesn't stop the sting.

That was the idea of Lance and Hunk, they are the only two in the story who come from solid home lives. Both of them mean well, but their lack of understanding hurts. Hunk at least believes what Pidge says, even if he can't comprehend someone doing that. Lance by contrast is woefully ignorant - he is well meaning, we wanted to be clear on that. Whatever our opinion of Lance we respect his character and seeing fans of his explain how cool he is makes us want to do him justice.

The thing that helps us the most - stigma or not - was therapy. Our first visit (it was just one of us at the time) heard just a few surface things and told us our mother was manipulative and abusive and we should leave immediately. It took us a while to get to the point of accepting moving out, and longer still before the Escape.

But, to those who asked, yes. We are much, much better now. With it not even being a year it's hard to put it all in perspective, but time will help with that. Thank you to those who read the authors notes and realized how personal this fic was, and thanks to everyone who sent well wishes and words up support and shared hints of their own stories. It felt... a little weird to put this up for public display and we're still not sure if we _should_ have but the _need_ overtook any sense of propriety, and everyone has been very kind in that regard.

Thank you.


End file.
